Japanese Mothers and Obtenos: Lunch box as an ideological state apparatus

1. Both mothers and children are being watched carefully and judged in both how it is prepared and eaten.

2. Lunch Box (click arrow for picture)

2.1. Highly crafted elaborations of food

2.2. Artistically designed and precisely arranged

2.3. Mothers tend to spend inordinate amounts of time trying to please the child and show she is a good mother.

2.4. Coded as a cultural and aesthetic apparatus in Japan.

2.5. The obento is a representation of what the mother is and what the child should become. A model for school is added to what is a gift and a reminder from home.

3. Author's argument and conclusion

3.1. The obento is invested with a gendered state ideology.

3.2. The authorities of the nursery school, directly monitored by the state, oversee the tradition

3.3. The author is both an anthropologist and mother and placed her son in a nursery school in Tokyo for 15 months.

3.4. Obento as a routine, task, and art form of nursery school culture are endowed with ideological and gendered meanings that the state indirectly manipulates.

3.5. Pleasure and creativity for both parties are products of the tradition.

4. ISA (Ideological State Apparatus) serves to indoctrinate people into seeing the world a certain way and of accepting certain identities as their own within that world.

5. State Ideology

5.1. Neo Marxist Louis Althusser:

5.1.1. Conceptualization of power a a force which operates in ways

5.1.2. Two major structures:

5.1.2.1. Repressive state apparatus

5.1.2.1.1. state wields power through a threat of force: law and police.

5.1.2.2. Ideological state apparatus

5.1.2.2.1. institutions which have some overt function other than a political and/or administrative on: mass media, education, health and welfare.

5.1.3. In modern capitalist societies such as Japan, it is the school, according to Althusser, which assumes the primary role of ideological state apparatus.

5.1.3.1. A greater segment of the population spends longer hours and more years here than in previous historical periods.

5.2. Which is more powerful, force or ideology?

5.2.1. ISA can be more influential,far-reaching and insidious than the SA's power of coercion.

5.2.2. It's in the movies we watch, the music we hear, the liquor we drink, textbooks we read.

5.2.3. The world of gender equalities becomes as a naturalized environment.

5.3. Learning to follow directions, do as one is told are social imperatives, sanctioned by the state, and taught in the schools.

6. What is the point?

6.1. Anne Allison beseeches the reader to look for deeper meaning behind this tradition and implies an ulterior motive, "What is not so immediately apparent, however, is why a small child with limited appetite and perhaps scant interest in food is the recipient of a meal as elaborate and elaborately prepared as any made for an entire family or invited guests."