new Japanese mythologies: faltering discipline and the ailing housewife

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Abstract
Health professionals and the mass media have reported a sharp rise in the incidence of a variety of syndromes and neuroses in postwar Japan. The origins of these “diseases of civilization” are often explicitly associated with a breakdown of traditional values, and especially with the rise of the nuclear family. The remaking of a postwar cultural identity is discussed, with emphasis on the roles that the family, in particular the mothers, are assigned in this endeavor. A new disease, “menopausal syndrome,” is used as an example in order to examine the relationship of postulated physical distress during midlife, individual personality and behavior, and the social role assigned to middle‐class housewives. It is shown that the rhetoric about menopause is one part of the larger cultural debate about modernization in Japan. Although this rhetoric is accepted as accurate by the majority of women, survey research shows that it is erroneous and bears no relationship to the incidence of the physical discomfort it seeks to explain. The attempted medicalization of menopause and its relationship to the cultural debate is also discussed. [Japan, modernization, medicalization]