Collaborative Research

Family and Love StudiesCoordinator : TOMIYAMA, Ichiro (Visiting Professor / Graduate School of Global Studies, Doshisha University)

Conflicts among family members, spousal and child abuse, poverty among single-parent households: these are all familiar family problems, but have been aggravated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, we have not freed ourselves from the ideal of nuclear family, a group consisted of a heterosexual couple and their children, being united by a sense of intimacy and love. It is clear this ideal no longer reflect real family life, where more people are in non-heterosexual relationships, more women participate in labor force and more children are born with assisted reproductive technology. Family laws and policies in Japan, however, are based on a model of nuclear-family consisted of a working father, a housewife mother and their biological children, and therefore disseminate the ideal image and encourage the practice of nuclear-family, making it hard for married couples to have separate family names and civil codes regarding the legal status of a child born after divorce to be revised.

We aim at constructing new models for family that can accommodate diverse practice of family life across the globe, by bringing together legal, institutional, historical, socio-cultural, medical, philosophical insights and conducting comparative studies of family life in different cultures. What makes our project unique among the previous studies of family is our focus on "love"—love in a couple, love in the family, love between parents and children, and love of children for their parents. Perhaps, the vital role of nuclear-family, organized around its ability to integrate sexuality, reproduction and nurturing of next generations under the banner of "love," has come to an end. Nevertheless, it survives as a moral value in the name of "family bonds." It is, therefore, an urgent task to make visible driving forces behind and discursive operations through which the idea of nuclear-family continues to survive.

Research period : Apr. 2022 – Mar. 2025

Last updated: July 10, 2023