Japan's Mother Complex -- Hit TV Program Strikes A Nerve With Audience

TOKYO - Are Japanese men turning into mama's boys who can't make love to their wives?

The highest-rated hit of the TV season has been the story of Fuyuhiko, a tormented young graduate of top-ranked Tokyo University who refuses to have sex with his wife because "you are not the wife I desire you to be," i.e., like his mother.

By late September, the weekly serial reached its denouement - the unhappy youth, after learning of his wife's affair with her high school sweetheart, lands in jail for trying to kill his mother - and more than one-third of Japanese households were watching.

Popular magazines ran lengthy discussions on maza-con, the imported Japanese word for mother complex. Newspapers printed questionnaires asking, "How much like Fuyuhiko are you?" Radio talk shows were inundated by calls when the hosts asked, "Do you know anyone like Fuyuhiko?"

"People who watch know it's an extreme case, but they can identify," said Yoriko Madoka, director of the Institute of Modern Family Issues. `"lmost all husbands in Japan have the mother-complex tendency."

`EDUCATION MAMAS'

That reality, the experts say, is an entire generation of men raised in households where workaholic fathers were mostly absent and "education mamas" doted on their male children. Now that they are out in the real world, these men look for women who will wait on them hand and foot.

In the most extreme cases, like the fictional example of Fuyuhiko, the man refuses to have sex with his wife. "He expects women to play a traditional role and do the same things a mother would do for him," said Nobue Nakamura, a leading member of Japan's growing psychotherapeutic community.

But "since he looks on all women as mother, to have sex with a woman is to have sex with mother," she said. "That's why he can't do it."

Experts blame contemporary economic relations for the Fuyuhiko personality. Absent-father syndrome is still the reality of Japanese corporate life.

"Salarymen" leave home early for their two-hour commute to work. And they come home late after drinking all evening with the boys from the office.

While there is often a psychological cost for their devotion to work and occasionally the ultimate price (karoshi, or death from overwork), these salarymen remain willing recruits in Japan's national drive for economic supremacy.

Wives' reaction has been no less extreme. Denied a meaningful place in the Japanese economy, many mothers devote all their attention to their children.

"The current mothers who grew up in the 1950s through 1970s were raised in a very conservative society," said Nakamura, whose psychotherapy services are sought by successful businessmen and their distraught wives. "They're intellectual. They're sophisticated. They have lots of time and money. They have small houses and few kids. They are full of energy, and they pour it into their children, especially their male children."

In extreme cases, the mother's role doesn't stop after the child has entered a good college and landed a good job. She will arrange his marriage to a proper family, and constantly interject herself into his new life.

AMBIVALENCE

Counselors report an ambivalent attitude on the part of young women to these potential Fuyuhikos.

On the one hand, the rise in the age of marriage, the postponement of having children and the increasing number of women who eschew marriage altogether to pursue meaningful careers suggest a growing rejection of the male-centered universe.

On the other hand, many female TV viewers, possibly the next generation of education mamas, reportedly were sympathetic toward Fuyuhiko.

"A person like Fuyuhiko appeals to their mother instinct," said Minami of Hitosubashi University. "They prefer a man they can control."