For Japanese men, dysfunction starts in the cradle

I was lucky. I didn’t have a Japanese mother. My mother had four boys. She had a job. She had my father to deal with. She had her hands full. With my mother juggling the various contradictory roles imposed on women by Western society, I had the freedom to develop more or less as I wanted to, and passed through the Sturm und Drang of adolescence without too many hang-ups about the female sex. Any hang-ups I do have are entirely of my own making. They weren’t spoon-fed to me by a domineering mother when I was too young to resist.

One reason Japan is a male-dominated society is because most Japanese men have a problem relating to women properly. This is why the male business phalanx is so tight-knit. It also explains why Japanese men, once they get out of the house first thing in the morning, are so reluctant to return until the last train at night. If women got into positions of power in Japan, the middle-aged businessman you see confidently strutting around hailing a cab to a business meeting or a hostess bar would turn into gibbering nervous wrecks.

This whole unbalanced society — from the drunks on the last train to the ridiculous caricatures of women called hostesses to the lonely housewives slowly going dotty over their morose, “fatherless” kids — all goes back to one source: the Japanese mother.