The Birth of Rational Parental Love in Early 20th Century Japan

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In Japan, between the 1890s and the 1920s, promoters of a new style of parenting proudly proclaimed an emotion, love, to be the family’s new guiding ethos. According to love’s advocates, emotion now needed to inform every moment of parental attention directed toward the child. Yet the birth of this new ideal of child-centered love was far from a simple or self-evident process. Parental love, like all emotions, is not a timeless feeling but a sentiment informed by particular historical circumstances. Japan’s early 20th century version of parental love was analytic and scientific, hardheaded and clinical, what was called at the time “rational love”. And it took much time and effort for its 20th century promoters to define the emotion, promote its necessity, and to realize its employment in the rearing of Japan’s children. This period of emotional reorientation birthed not only a new emotional style of parenting but also an “emotional community” of rationally loving mothers.