Japanese Fathers' Child-caring and Masculinities of Ikumen

Can Caring Masculinities Achieve Gender Equality?

Abstract

This paper examines the masculinities of “Ikumen” , the child-caring men in Japanese policy for work-family balance, and discusses the effects and problems of caring masculinities.

This paper explores the Ikumen figures shown in the leaflets and posters used by the Japanese policy “Ikumen project” from 2010 to 2018. Ikumen is a father figure who not only takes child-care well, but also works hard as a breadwinner. Ikumen takes almost the same quality of child-care as mothers, but they have less time for child-care than mothers. The work style of Ikumen is influenced by the Salaryman masculinity, the Japanese hegemonic masculinity post World War II. Therefore, they cannot achieve gender equality in child-care.

“Caring masculinities” is a new kind of masculinity for gender equality, and includes caring which is considered as femininity. It is an important strategy in the EU to make men caring. Caring masculinities makes it easy for both masculine men and companies to accept caring men. However, this strategy also has a problem in that it is difficult to exclude the domination of hegemonic masculinity from caring masculinities. For achieving gender equality in care, it is important to exclude any gender norms from caring, as argued by feminist care theories.