Home Cooking as Family Love and the Rise of Social Standards for Meals in Modern Japan : Analysis of Newspaper Articles

In the process of modernization of family in Japan, home cooking has been given a special value, and homemade meals became as a symbol of family love. As a result, even today, homemade meals by married women function strongly as a symbol of love. This may be one of the reasons why the excessive burden of housework put on women and the division of gender roles have not changed much when compared to other countries. This paper examines the origin of the norm in Japan that a wife should prepare extremely time-consuming homemade meals for her family in relation to modern family norms of affection, using text analysis. First, an analysis of articles from Yomiuri Shimbun (1874-2020) that included koshi-ben, aisai bento, and aijo bento in their headlines revealed that a strong connotation of between a homemade bento and affection was established in the mid-1960s to 1970 in Japan and has continued to the present day. Second, an analysis of articles on daily family food menus and recipes that appeared in Yomiuri Shimbun (1915-2020) shows that social standards for daily homemade meals in Japan rose sharply in the 1970s, and the menu consisting of one soup and three dishes became commonplace between the end of 1980s and the early 1990s. But it was also found that from the mid-1990s onward, there was a growing awareness of the need to shorten time and save labor when preparing meals. The above analyses reveal that the rapid rise of social standards for wives' homemade cooking went hand in hand with the emergence of the idea that a married woman's homemade cooking is a sign of her love for her family. This suggests that the deep-rooted tendency in Japan to view a wife's home-cooked meal as a proof of love is one of the reasons why wives have been slow to reduce their burden of housework, even today.departmental bulletin pape