Taking Leave Matthew T. Apple
2015
Taking leave: An American on paternity leave in Japan © 2015 Matthew Thomas Apple and Perceptia Press Published by Perceptia Press, Nagoya, Japan in association with Panurgic Publishing 1st Edition Printing: 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in Korea All rights reserved. This book must not be copied or reproduced in any form whatsoever. ISBN978-4-939130-43-4 Book Code: 101—E139 Names and places cited within the text have been replaced with pseudonyms in the interest of privacy. All photographs were taken by the author. Some photographs and parts of the text have previously appeared online in on the author’s public blog Taking Leave (http://takingleaveinJapan.wordpress.com/) and debito.org but have been altered, updated, corrected, and edited for this book. Acknowledgements I wish to thank former colleagues who encouraged me to take childcare leave, and who helped me transition back to work afterwards, friends and family who offered support during the childcare leave and whose advice greatly helped me become a better husband and parent, and, of course, my wife and children, without whom work means nothing.
In memoriam et honorarium
This book is dedicated to my baby brother, T.J., who never had a chance to grow up‌ to my teenage brother Jared, whose dream of teaching was cut short‌ and to my parents, who managed to raise eight more children to adulthood‌ I may finally have just an inkling of what it must have been like.
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Contents
Author’s Foreword................................................................................... vii 1: The Paperwork...................................................................................... 1 2: Health Check...................................................................................... 13 3: Getting Sick........................................................................................ 27 4: Food Culture....................................................................................... 45 5: Vacations............................................................................................. 57 6: Half..................................................................................................... 67 7: Holidays & Festivals............................................................................ 77 8: Playtime.............................................................................................. 91 9: Staying at Home............................................................................... 103 10: Nursery School................................................................................ 121 11: Thoughts on Childcare Leave.......................................................... 131 12: Endings & Beginnings.................................................................... 145 Appendix: Child-Raising Terms in Japanese.......................................... 149 About the Author.................................................................................. 158
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Author’s Foreword
I’m a 43-year-old American teaching English in the heartland of Japan, who is blessed with a beautiful, hardworking wife and two wonderfully rambunctious daughters. In 2010, I successfully applied for and was granted a full year’s childcare leave by my school at the time, making me the first male teacher to do so. My experiences are documented in this book in the hopes of not only informing readers about cultural differences while offering entertaining child-raising anecdotes, but also with the goal of encouraging more men to take paternity leave whether in Japan or elsewhere. vii
Taking Leave Starting from when I submitted the application in late 2009, I wrote a blog to document my experiences raising a bilingual daughter in a monolingual culture (or is it truly monolingual? guess again… ). This book is based on edited selections from that blog, with lots of updated and new information about the state of childcare and the graying demographic “time bomb” of Japanese society. I still maintain the blog, which now includes more posts about child-raising in general as well as social commentary as opposed to just childcare leave. I’ve been in Japan for over fifteen years now, but I certainly do not claim to be an expert on Japan. As a new dad, I’m also not a child-rearing authority, either. Please keep that in mind; some of the information I list both here in this book and on my blog may not be 100% correct. Please check with the appropriate authorities before making any decisions about your own children. I’m also an “older” dad, having been 37 years old when my first daughter was born (the average first-fatherhood age in Japan is around 30). This fact undoubtedly affects my way of thinking, and certainly my physical condition, regarding childcare. While I by no means discourage older men from having children, I do think that older men face slightly different challenges than younger men, particularly regarding the sudden, abrupt change from set daily patterns. It’s not easy, as I found out, but being older also gave me perspective and insight that younger fathers may not experience, especially young fathers who never lived alone prior to having children. That is to say, this book is not a daily blow-by-blow account of doing laundry, cooking, washing dishes, taking walks in the park, or other typical child-caring activities… because, quite frankly, I found it impossible to keep a day to day diary / blog while on childcare leave. When I did try, the result was too monotonous and boring to read. Instead, I only wrote about things that I thought were different, unusual, interesting, or incredibly rewarding, especially compared to how an American father might experience childcare leave in the US. I apologize to readers who hail from cultural backgrounds other than that of the US or Japan; being originally from a small town in New York State, the US is my only cultural frame of reference. Readers are welcome to share their own stories of childcare and child-raising in other cultural contexts on my blog. viii
Foreword This book is different from what I usually do in my regular job as a university professor of English communication. That is, write fairly dry academic research papers filled with statistics and references to other fairly dry academic research papers. This is not an “academic book” but rather a straightforward, “easy-access” book primarily aimed at those with little knowledge of but some interest in Japan and Japanese society. The anecdotes and commentary are based on my experiences as an English-speaking foreigner in a country struggling with a drop in the national childbirth rate and whose rapidly aging population is being viewed in some quarters as a foreshadowing of societal and economic problems that will soon plague much of the industrialized world. On my personal blog (http://takingleaveinJapan.wordpress.com/ references), I have included a list of references for the information contained in each chapter. Apologies ahead of time for links that may become inactive by publication time. For those unfamiliar with Japanese language, I have additionally provided, in an appendix, a glossary of important words related to childcare in Japan, as well as other words and phrases I thought might be useful or interesting. Japanese words in the text appear in italics; some of these words appear in the glossary (note that not every italicized word is glossed, as some words are important than others). Also, readers will notice that I don’t use my daughter’s name (or my wife’s name, or anyone else’s name, for that matter). Although it’s a simple matter to find out who the people are in my life if you really try hard enough, I’d like to respect their right to privacy and so I’ll simply refer to them by pseudonyms or periphrastic go-arounds like “my daughter” and “my colleagues.” I hope readers will, likewise, respect the anonymity of those involved in my family’s life. Additionally, by no means do I want to give anyone the impression that I think I’m a “model father” just because I took paternity leave. I made many mistakes during my year of childcare leave, and even now I occasionally lose my patience and my temper with my children. I’m not proud of some ix
Taking Leave incidents that have occurred and still have a lot to learn about being a parent. However, my year of childcare leave helped me to understand much more about the difficulties and the joys of raising children, and I also learned an awful lot about being a parent. My experiences made me not only a better father, but also a better person (and also maybe even a better teacher). Thanks must go to my friends, relatives, and former colleagues who have helped me learn how to be a parent before, during, and after paternity leave. I am indebted to you all. I should also thank those who assisted in the preparation of this book in the form you see it, especially Paul Lewis, for his editorial and design advice, and my wonderfully supportive spouse Etsuko, who painstakingly proofread and criticized my Japanese (and helped me correct many, many factual mistakes made in the original blog posts). Needless to say, any and all remaining mistakes are my own. If you have any comments about the book or would like to share your own experiences, please feel free to do so! You can leave comments on any blog posting on http://takingleaveinJapan.wordpress.com and you can also tweet me @manzano0627. Also, please don’t forget to “like� the FaceBook page for this book. You can find lots of posts to childcare-related news stories there as well as more information about the book. Now, on to the child-raising leave stories and biting social commentary. Enjoy!
Matt September 30, 2015
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1 The Paperwork
One day in April 2010, I was playing with my one-year-old daughter at a local child support center. A group of mothers, who had, of course, brought their own children that morning, asked if I had taken one or two months of childcare leave. No doubt they were aware of the then-government’s call for more men in Japan to take paternity leave. “No, a full year,” I responded. 1
Taking Leave Stunned expressions of disbelief followed. But I got used to that—even though I’m one of the few men in Japan (fewer than 2% annually, with occasional blips to slightly above 2.5%) to take childcare leave. For any length of time. My childcare leave officially started on April 1, 2010, and lasted until March 31, 2010—basically, one academic year in Japan. However, the process of applying for leave started about half a year prior to that. Technically, I was required to give about one month’s notice before applying for leave, according to the Act on the Welfare of Workers Who Take Care of Children or Other Family Members Including Child Care and Family Care Leave (one of the longest names on record, perhaps?). However, I was asked in November 2009, by the General Affairs Office (soumu-ka) of my school to check with my department head for “permission” to take childcare leave. Said permission notwithstanding, the General Affairs Chief promised me at the time that, in the event the Department Head refused or evaded, he was prepared to support me in my claim as to the legality of taking childcare leave. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that, and I was given permission to apply for the leave. The conditions for applying were a bit complicated, but the forms were fairly simple. Essentially, because my wife or other close family relative (i.e., grandparents) were unable to care for my infant daughter, I was allowed by law to take childcare leave. This is called ikuji-kyuugyou in Japanese. On the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare’s homepage, the English version stated at the time that mothers could take fourteen weeks of fullpaid “child birth leave” (sanzen-sangou-kyuugyou) from six weeks prior to the birth and up to eight weeks after the birth. After that period, until the child is one year old, workers could take paid leave, in the form of a halfsalary reimbursement as a stipend from the central government. After my leave started in April 2010, the age of the child was extended to 14 months old, and both parents were allowed to take childcare leave at the same time. However, I was “grandfathered,” and since my daughter turned one year old the next month, I only received half-pay for the month of April. On the other hand, as a public servant working for a national college, I was 2
Chapter 1 told that I could take childcare leave from my daughter’s first birthday until she was the age of 3, but the leave would be entirely unpaid. Needless to say, I was not prepared to earn no salary for two years, and my colleagues would certainly not have been happy to let me not teach for two years. The conditions of the year leave were already fairly severe. The conditions were that I had to be already employed for over 12 months, had to be able to continue working at the same company after the leave ended, and would not receive any salary during the leave, not even the half-pay stipend from the government. The last condition hurt; I was even told that not being paid during leave would, additionally, impact on my retirement pay from the school as well as future national pension payments (assuming the system is still solvent some twenty-five years from now). Moreover, I still had to pay income tax, since this in Japan is based on the previous year’s income. But in this case, the means justified the ends. My daughter’s welfare was more important to me than a year’s salary. At any rate, I was given permission to take childcare leave, which, to my knowledge was the first time a male employee at that school had ever done so. One person in my department tried to convince me otherwise, saying that he and his wife had left both their children at daycare when they were four and five months old. However, other male colleagues encouraged and even congratulated me for taking the leave. Several privately confided that it was too bad the law had not been in effect when their own children were born. On the other hand, one female colleague told me that her husband not only didn’t bother taking leave a few years ago, but furthermore refused to lift a finger around the house at all. She lamented the fact that “Japanese men” expected their wives to do all the child-raising in addition to working a full-time job. There is some reason to suggest that, among developed countries, Japanese men spend the least amount of time per day helping with household chores, and, long working hours, as well as a traditional, conservative mindset that says that women should stay at home while men go to work all day, are partly to blame for this. But I do know two things: The first is that Japan has one the world’s lowest rates of childbirth at about 3
Taking Leave 1.4, in addition to the world’s lowest rate of fathers taking childcare leave. These seem logically connected. The second is that, as a teacher, I am expected to care for my students. If that’s the case, then, how could I take care of other people’s children before learning how to care for my own child?
＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿ On the morning of November 1, 2009, after the usual 25-minute walk to campus from the station, I headed straight for the General Affairs office. In my hands: a plastic sleeve folder containing the four pieces of paper so far required for the Child Raising Leave Application (ikuji-kyuugyoumoushikomi-sho). To their credit, the General Affairs office staff were extremely helpful and supportive from the very beginning. When I had initially approached the previous Personnel Department Chief (jinji-gakkarichou) in late May that year about the possibility of Paternity Leave, he urged me to take a year off. “I myself had a second child in the spring,” he confided. “In Japan, office workers do not often take leave of absence, but you should take it. It is your right.” A new jinji-gakkarichou had then transferred in from a large public university in mid-June. A number of duties awaited the new chief, and I also had my own duties to attend to. When I was finally able to talk with him in July, he confirmed that, according to the labor laws for public employees, I was entitled to take a leave of absence until my child turned 3 years old. “But first, you might want to discuss this with the gakka-shunin (Faculty Department Head),” he suggested. Implying, in a not-so-subtle way, that I was expected to do so. I put off the “discussion” for the summer, thinking it was a topic best broached after the final exams in September (yes, Spring Term Exams were in September at that school; it apparently followed the old academic calendar that most Japanese schools abandoned in the early to mid-90s in favor of a Spring/Fall or trimester system). 4
Chapter 1 Even after the fall term started, I resisted approaching the English gakkashunin, Professor A, until the middle of November. One reason was that I felt that waiting until a less stressful time of the semester might make things easier. Another was that I wanted him to see how hard I was working for the department, particularly after spending an entire weekend being the MC for a speech contest. When the time came, I simply had to visit his office… directly across the hallway from mine (yes, avoiding this talk for half a year may have reduced stress for Prof. A, but may also have increased mine!). As I raised the topic, I could sense his concern… … and to my great relief, Prof. A immediately expressed his understanding for the situation I found myself in. First, he started by saying that 9 months was too young to be in a small private daycare center all day long, five days a week, which is what would have happened that February when my wife returned to work. Then, unexpectedly, he added, “My wife and I used to live in your city, and at the time we had no choice but to leave our children at the daycare center.” He had had the same experience over two decades before, and seemingly regretted it. And now he was supporting me. I couldn’t believe it. Here I was, stressed the whole time about broaching the topic of childcare leave, and his initial reaction was to try to help me take leave. Prof. A’s reaction was considerably better than that of a number of teachers at the school, many of whom expressed their attitude toward my taking leave by simply not saying anything to me. The atmosphere quickly became… a bit strange. Whenever I walked past certain teachers in the hallway, or walked into the teacher’s lounge or kitchen area, there seemed to be an odd tension in the air. Considering that workplaces even in so-called individualistic “Western” societies such as the US and the UK are often openly hostile towards fathers 5
Taking Leave who ask for time off for children, I was probably getting off lucky. In fact, I may have inadvertently benefited from previous reports in Japan. In 1992, in what was widely publicized as the first incident of a man taking childcare leave from a private company in Japan, Mutsumi Ota took three months off from his job and wrote about his experiences for Japan Quarterly, a defunct publication of the liberal newspaper Asahi Shimbun. He wrote that colleagues laughed at him, saying he would have a threemonth “vacation,” but instead, he found himself isolated at home, stared at in public, and shunned by women pushing baby carriages in local parks. On the positive side, he also wrote about his increased interest in local community activities, and his role in maintaining a webpage for a group devoted to gender rights and child-raising issues (Ikujiren). Ota reported (in 1996) that a miniscule 0.16% of men took childcare leave in Japan. Yet almost 20 years later, only 2% of eligible fathers in Japan on average take childcare leave for any length of time, even for just a few days. So why haven’t more men in Japan taken advantage of the law to help raise their children? The situation is not all that different from that in the UK and the US. For example, in the UK in 2009, 54% of men with infants felt they were not spending enough time with their kids, but 45% of childcare-eligible men didn’t take paid leave of any kind… despite the fact that the maximum leave allowable by law was only two weeks long. Two weeks! According to the report above, the “modern working father” in the UK is “miserable about the proportion of time he is able to devote to his children, but… is too nervous to demand flexible working from his employers.” And the US? According to one poll, 63% of American men feel that they should take advantage of the Family and Medical Leave Act, which requires companies employing 50 or more workers to give men up to 12 weeks unpaid leave. Yet few do, due to “corporate culture,” fear of the “Daddy track,” and “workplace hostility.” 6