One of my favorite movies is Pleasantville, a fun film about two modern-day teenagers who get transported inside a 1950s-era black-and-white TV show similar to Father Knows Best or Leave it to Beaver. In the strange universe of Pleasantville, every wife stays in the kitchen cooking her family’s dinner, and there’s a funny scene where the husband comes home to an empty house to find no wife and no dinner waiting for him, which utterly confuses him since it’s supposed to be impossible in the world he lives in. Watching that scene the other day amused me because just that day my Japanese father-in-law had been upset because his wife had gone off to a UNESCO meeting without leaving his dinner, forcing him to fend for himself in the kitchen, never an easy task for an older Japanese man. The idea that a funny joke about life in the 1950s could still describe people in contemporary Japan is a surprise, but then Japan is a very different place from the U.S. In my family I’m considered the daikoku-bashira or the “big black pillar” that holds up the family, and it’s always interesting to observe from a cultural standpoint the way my Japanese wife or her mother jumps up when I get home from work, fetching me a bowl of rice and my chopsticks in a way that reinforces my role in the family. Part of me feels like resisting that kind of treatment, since I don’t think it’s particularly necessary, but in the end I usually just shut up and eat my dinner.
