Most Japanese children are not weaned till shortly before a new baby is born, but the government’s Mother’s Magazine has in late years approved of weaning the baby at eight months. Middle-class mothers often do this, but it is far from being the common custom in Japan. True to the Japanese feeling that nursing is a great pleasure to the mother, those circles which are gradually adopting the custom regard the shorter nursing period as a mother’s sacrifice to the welfare of her child. When they accept the new dictum that ‘the child who nurses long is weak,’ they blame the mother for her self-indulgence if she has not weaned her baby. ‘She says she can’t wean her baby. It’s only that she hasn’t made up her own mind. She wants to go on. She is getting the better part.’ With such an attitude, it is quite understandable that eight-month weaning has not become widespread. There is a practical reason also for late weaning. The Japanese do not have a tradition of special foods for a just-weaned baby. If he is weaned young, he is fed the water in which rice has been boiled, but ordinarily he passes directly from his mother’s milk to the usual adult fare. Cow’s milk is not included in Japanese diet and they do not prepare special vegetables for children. Under the circumstances there is a reasonable doubt whether the government is correct in teaching that ‘the child who nurses long is weak.’
Children are usually weaned after they can understand what is said to them. They have sat in their mother’s lap at the family table during meals and been fed bits of the food; now they eat more of it. Some children are feeding problems at this time, and this is easy to understand when they are weaned because of the birth of a new baby. Mothers often offer them sweets to buy them off from begging to nurse. Sometimes a mother will put pepper on her nipples. But all mothers tease them by telling them they are proving that they are mere babies if they want to nurse. ‘Look at your little cousin. He’s a man. He’s little like you and he doesn’t ask to nurse.’ ‘That little boy is laughing at you because you’re a boy and you still want to nurse.’ Two-, three-, and four-year-old children who are still demanding their mother’s breast will often drop it and feign indifference when an older child is heard approaching.
This teasing, this urging a child toward adulthood, is not confined to weaning. From the time the child can understand what is said to it, these techniques are common in any situation. A mother will say to her boy baby when he cries, ‘You’re not a girl,’ or ‘You’re a man.’ Or she will say, ‘Look at that baby. He doesn’t cry.’ When another baby is brought to visit, she will fondle the visitor in her own child’s presence and say, ‘I’m going to adopt this baby. I want such a nice, good child. You don’t act your age.’ Her own child throws itself upon her, often pommeling her with its fists, and cries, ‘No, no, we don’t want any other baby. I’ll do what you say.’ When the child of one or two has been noisy or has failed to be prompt about something, the mother will say to a man visitor, ‘Will you take this child away? We don’t want it.’ The visitor acts out his r?le. He starts to take the child out of the house. The baby screams and calls upon its mother to rescue it. He has a full-sized tantrum. When she thinks the teasing has worked, she relents and takes back the child, exacting its frenzied promise to be good. The little play is acted out sometimes with children who are as old as five and six.
Teasing takes another form too. The mother will turn to her husband and say to the child, ‘I like your father better than you. He is a nice man.’ The child gives full expression to his jealousy and tries to break in between his father and mother. His mother says, ‘Your father doesn’t shout around the house and run around the rooms.’ ‘No, no,’ the child protests, ‘I won’t either. I am good. Now do you love me?’ When the play has gone on long enough, the father and mother look at one another and smile. They may tease a young daughter in this way as well as a young son.
Such experiences are rich soil for the fear of ridicule and of ostracism which is so marked in the Japanese grown-up. It is impossible to say how soon little children understand that they are being made game of by this teasing, but understand it they do sooner or later, and when they do, the sense of being laughed at fuses with the panic of the child threatened with loss of all that is safe and familiar. When he is a grown man, being laughed at retains this childhood aura.
The panic such teasing occasions in the two-to five-year-old child is the greater because home is really a haven of safety and indulgence. Division of labor, both physical and emotional, is so complete between his father and mother that they are seldom presented to him as competitors. His mother or his grandmother runs the household and admonishes the child. They both serve his father on their knees and put him in the position of honor. The order of precedence in the home hierarchy is clear-cut. The child has learned the prerogatives of elder generations, of a male as compared with a female, of elder brother as compared with younger brother. But at this period of his life a child is indulged in all these relationships. This is strikingly true if he is a boy. For both girls and boys alike the mother is the source of constant and extreme gratifications, but in the case of a three-year-old boy he can gratify against her even his furious anger. He may never manifest any aggression toward his father, but all that he felt when he was teased by his parents and his resentments against being ‘given away’ can be expressed in tantrums directed against his mother and his grandmother. Not all little boys, of course, have these tantrums, but in both villages and upper-class homes they are looked upon as an ordinary part of child life between three and six. The baby pommels his mother, screams, and, as his final violence, tears down her precious hair-do. His mother is a woman and even at three years old he is securely male. He can gratify even his aggressions.