“Papá está aquí”. Paternidades comprometidas en el cine japonés contemporáneo

Abstract

Gender roles in Japanese society are firmly established and, traditionally, it is expected that the salaryman father will work outside the home while the mother will stay in their house looking after their children. This division of responsibilities, along with the demanding Japanese working culture, has contributed to the naturalization of a type of fatherhood characterized by absence and emotional disconnection, since the only function of fathers seems to provide economic support. Nonetheless, in the last decades, new conceptualizations of fatherhood have emerged, such as the notion of ikumen, and they claim for a bigger participation of men in domestic tasks and childrearing. This social debate has caused the production of media works focused on the change or the transformation of fathers.  In order to reflect on the ways in which contemporary Japanese cinema has started to disseminate a new model of fatherhood, this paper discusses four recent films dealing with father-child relationships. By performing an analysis of the filmic discourse, characters and their evolution, this research confirms that this new type of father does the housework (cooking, looking after children, communicating) and prioritizes his family over his work. These films also show the difficulties that these fathers face, mainly work-life balance and social prejudices based on a traditional notion of masculinity.