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Subject: No Sympathy Here; Japanese Advice Columnists Tell the Troubled: Shape Up!<By
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 92 04:44:31 EST
Message-ID: <48.1992Nov19.044432@AmeriCast.com>

No Sympathy Here; Japanese Advice Columnists Tell the Troubled:
Shape Up!<By T. R. Reid=Washington Post Foreign Service=

TOKYO, Nov. 18 - Mrs. T. of Yamaguchi has the kind of problem Ann
Landers would love to handle.

A mother of two in her late 20s, Mrs. T. has been appalled to
find that her 35-year-old husband has no time at all for the
children. "He leaves for the office early and comes home late, so
he never sees the kids," she wrote.

"Even on his days off, he leaves in the morning and doesn't come
home until they're in bed.  When the children ask him to play, he
says, 'Yeah, okay,' but then he goes out. . . . My heart aches to
see my own children, full of envy, watching the other kids in the
neighborhood playing with their fathers on Sunday."

Mrs.  T. became so upset that she recently wrote a letter about
her problem to the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper's "Jinsei Annai"
(Guide to Life) column - Japan's version of Ann Landers. But the
answer she got was hardly in the Ann Landers style.

"Please, be patient with your husband," the newspaper replied.

"You didn't mention what kind of job he has," it noted, "but
maybe he is engaged in scientific research. People like that
often ignore their families. . . . So please treat him warmly,
and give the children more time yourself to fill the gap. I hope
your husband is successful on the job."

It is not exactly the way an American advice column would be
likely to respond to that letter, but this is precisely what loy-
al readers of "Jinsei Annai" and other advice columns here have
come to expect.

Like the society it serves, the personal advice offered in
Japanese print and broadcast outlets is concerned most of all
with the maintenance of social harmony, the avoidance of confron-
tation, and the importance of hard work. The most common piece of
advice offered to the long-suffering questioners is that they
practice the stoic virtue Japan loves most: gaman, a word that
means endurance, tolerance, and bearing pain without complaint.

Those seeking advice are "most commonly urged to be patient, to
try to see a bad situation through, to accept part of the blame,"
noted John A. McKinstry and Asako Nakajima McKinstry, two sociol-
ogists who studied advice columns to get an inside look at
Japanese society.

Rather than the chipper "things will all work out" approach of
many American advice columns, the Japanese version takes a more
somber view of the world, the McKinstry study says. Letter writ-
ers are told "in general not to expect the best solution to in-
volve the writer's self-interest."

"Jinsei Annai," which has run daily for decades in the Yomiuri,
the largest-circulation daily newspaper in the world, is a group
effort, like so many other things in Japan.  Rather than a single
personality, a' la Ann Landers, to answer queries, the column
uses a revolving team of experts, mainly women. Those seeking ad-
vice also are almost entirely women, but that does not mean they
get much empathy from the experts.

Consider the plight of Mrs. C., in Ibaragi. She married three
years ago and moved to her husband's home. She wrote to "Jinsei
Annai" last week to complain that the house is always filthy,
that nobody but she ever bothers to clean, and that "it drives me
crazy to see my baby crawling on that filthy floor." When she
pleaded with her husband to move to another house, he refused so
rudely that she is thinking about divorce.

The reply, from author Keiko Ochiai, was not sympathetic. "You
have to learn to get along with other people," she wrote. "If
cleanliness doesn't play a big role in your husband's family, you
have to be patient. . . . If you smile brightly, and clean the
house as well as you can, this may have an impact on the other
people in the house."

The column was even tougher on Mrs. R. of Tokyo, a 50-year-old
woman who wrote that she is jealous of her 75-year-old mother. "I
have the feeling that my husband, who is 49, is more attached to
her than to me."

The answer, from the well-known female novelist Tei Fujiwara, was
not encouraging. "You should try to be happy about this. Stop
complaining," she wrote. She then proceeded to attack Mrs. R. for
"sloppiness," because Mrs. R.  had scrawled her question on the
back of an advertising flyer. "It seems to me your mother just
looks out for your husband to make up for your own shortcomings,"
the response concluded.

Some radio talk shows here also offer advice hours, something
like the "dial-a-shrink" programs familiar on talk radio in the
United States. But as with the "Jinsei Annai" columns, these pro-
grams tend to be more somber, more weighty, than American call-in
programs, with highly certified experts offering long, cautious
replies to queries about finance, children's education, health
problems, etc.

The closest Japanese society comes to a famous individual
advice-giver is the NTV network's television personality Monta
Mino, who appears each weekday on the daytime show "TV As You
Like It" and takes calls from the troubled.

Mino likes to stroll around the stage cracking jokes like a Phil
Donahue figure. But when it comes to advice, he too relies on the
group approach. His team of four experts who respond to viewers'
problems with pleas for patience and endurance, showing no more
sympathy than the advisers in the newspaper column.

Since Japan's version of Ann Landers tends to be so disappointing
to the letter writers, why are these media advisers so popular?

The answer, according to the McKinstry book, "Jinsei Annai," is
that "there are not many other places to which troubled Japanese
can turn for advice from a completely objective third party."
Japan has little of the "various kinds of counseling and psycho-
logical therapy accessible to people in the U.S."<02:37 11-
19C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

For more information, send-email to American Cybercasting Cor-
poration (usa@AmeriCast.COM)