John M. McKinstry - Jinsei Annai, Lifes Guide: Glimpses Of Japan Through A Popular Advice Column

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JINSEI ANNAI

Jinsei Annai

LIFE'S GUIDE
Glimpses of Japan through a popular advice column

John A. McKinstry
&
Asako Nakajima McKinstry

First published 1991

by M.E. Sharpe

Published 2015

by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 1991 by John A. McKinstry and Asako Nakajima McKinstry. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notices
No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use of operation of any methods, products, instructions or ide as contained in the material herein.

Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McKinstry, John A.
Jinsei Annai, life's guide: glimpses of Japan through a popular advice column / by
John A. McKinstry and Asako Nakajima McKinstry.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-87332-762-4
1. JapanSocial life and customs1945. 2. Conduct of life. I. McKinstry, Asako.
II. Title.
DS822.5.M38 1991
952.04dc20 90-24303
CIP

ISBN 13: 9780873327626 (hbk)

TO
SAKUE

Contents

Acknowledgments

WHEN YOU SET OUT TO write a book using as your primary source of quotations and examples someone else's copyrighted material, you of course are completely dependent on their generosity and cooperation. We wish to express our gratitude for the free hand the Yomiuri Shimbun gave us to reproduce Jinsei Annai articles. We owe a special debt of gratitude to Kishio Mori, Director of the Yomiuri Shimbun Information Research Department, for sponsoring our request to use the articles in any way we saw fit. We apologize to Jinsei Annai respondents for holding their writing up for scrutiny abroad without their knowledge and in ways which do not always represent their overall attitudes.

We have had several opportunities to spend time in Japan as members of university staffs, and we have always ended up playing the role of students far more than that of teachers. We thank the many people at Seinan Gakuin University and Kysh National University for their patient guidance and assistance during our sojourn at their campuses, and we especially want to thank the staff of Waseda University's International Division for the hospitality they showed us while we were honored to be among them.

We also wish to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Tsuneo Nakajima, President and Founder of Sunshine College in Tokyo, for the many favors he has extended to us over the years.

John A. McKinstry
Asako Nakajima McKinstry
Pismo Beach, California

JINSEI ANNAI

Chapter
Introduction: An Advice Column as a Mirror of Japanese Culture?

THE TWO OF US, a Japanese and an American, set out to write this small book with several specific goals in mind. For some time both of us had been looking for a way to explore situations and problems facing ordinary Japanese people and to share our own insights concerning these situations with people outside of Japan. We wanted to look briefly into some of the interesting differences between the two cultures in a more, what we might call, "colloquial" manner than is usually done. We decided that one interesting route into some of the more intimate areas of Japanese society, one that would provide background for analyzing certain aspects of everyday life, would be through a favorite piece of reading for both of us, Jinsei Annai, the column that appears daily in the most popular newspaper in Japan.

Jinsei Annai, "Life's Guide," is an advice column appearing in the double-page Kazoku to Kurashi "Family and Life" section of the morning edition of the Yomiuri Shimbun, one of Japan's big three national newspapers. Our concept entailed reading over carefully about a year's worth of the column to see in what ways it reflected significant points of stress in modern Japanese society.

At first this would seem to be a strange method of trying to better understand another way of life, and a couple of questions come immediately to mind. How much useful information could there be in a newspaper advice column? Would it really be possible, for example, for someone to gather any deeper understanding of American society by reading through, say, a year of the Ann Landers column?

Obviously, as a source of information, this type of material is limited; the answer to questions like the above would depend on the way the column was used. After all, the Ann Landers columnthat is, the kinds of problems and situations that are brought to it, and the way these problems are responded tois very American, and it certainly could provide insight into some of the ways Americans interpret life, into the particular kinds of things Americans worry most about, and into current points of tension in society that surface as personal problems for average people.

As anonymous appeals to the wisdom of a kind of community Dutch uncle, advice columns are useful indicators of the common mentality of a society. Both writers and respondents are generally in agreement as to how decent folk ought to behave, and in writing back and forth all parties reinforce the underlying principles that tie a society together. Certain kinds of romantic expectations of a particularly American type, for example, are as naturally expressed in Ann Landers-type columns as in any source available, and one could gather a great deal of information about what Americans feel it is like to be parents of teenagers by reading them.

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