3. Wrapping commodities and the morality of debt

According to most villagers, Obon,[60] the mid-summer season, and chugen gifts exemplify the character of obligation and the morals of exchange in Japanese gift giving. The commodities given as gifts in chugen must always be wrapped, and wrapping is always ritual in character. Chugen gifts, like seibo, are said to ‘repay debts’ accumulated during the year: people must ‘thank’ all those people to whom they owe something. The case of Hanako below shows a case of ‘traditional’ gift exchange from an important firm (family business). It shows how most decisions concerning gifts have a strong ‘economic’ character of compensation for ‘customer loyalty’, and how dependant a family may be on their relatives, and points to gifts as a source of social and economic income and prestige and the different notions of debt and obligation that take place.

Hanako is a married woman aged 68, grandmother of four children. She takes responsibility for most economic transactions in her husband’s business. When the bank employees do not come to her house to settle their accounts[61] with her husband, she drives to Tokushima to sort out their finances and carry out other tasks related to customers and payments. In chugen and seibo she receives numerous giri gifts from affiliated businesses and banks, mostly decorations and things she has little use for. She looks at the presents admiring their quality, good taste, or style. She keeps them as she hopes to give them to her daughter and son. She remarks that these gifts cost the banks very little, they obtain them from wholesale retailers who sometimes give them for nothing as part of business. She expects to receive towels from the post-office, the co-op, and several stores where she usually shops.

Hanako also has to make arrangements for giving chugen to people she wants to maintain good relations with such as providers who offered better deals when they had no reason to, neighbours who bought things from their shop, customers who made large investments in their business, and all her kin and most neighbours. The only giri gift is to her sister in-law, and if she could she would not make any as their families do not get on well together. Hanako will buy her something expensive from the catalogue and have it sent, so she will fulfil her duties, despite her sister-in-law having neglected many aspects of their relationship and gifts. Hanako buys gifts from catalogues as its saves time and they wrap the gifts. It also gives her pleasure to see the pictures of gifts (always food) and to be able to check the prices in the catalogue. Nights are spent going through the catalogue and prices. She chooses to order a set of melons for her sister-in-law (Y 15,000). Everybody knows that melons are one of the best gifts. They are certainly the most expensive. She will show her in-laws and everybody else that she can give generously and that in her heart she cares about them. She only buys three chugen gifts herself, the rest she orders through catalogues. The gifts that she buys and gives in person are a box of sake for people of her firm, because they ‘helped the business’. They are not 100% giri because she also owes some favours to one of her employees’ father. She travels to the city to the winestore of her maternal kin. She wants to contribute to make ‘their business’ by buying from them. She asks them to wrap it for her, as it saves her time. Because of the amount of sake she buys she receives a chugen discount. ‘It is good to make business with kin, with people that take care of you (ie. your domestic economy)’. It is a reciprocal action that counts as day-to-day help, although they see each other only five times a year. The other two shops she goes to, buy more sake, do not offer her a discount, but give her a towel. She does not complain at all: ‘I will find some use for them, there is always something to clean’. Finally, she has to deliver the gifts, which she finds a less pleasant task. That is what she likes about Sogo department store facilities. They wrap and deliver the gifts. Her house is full of chugen gifts. She enjoys receiving cakes most. This year she received eight boxes of cakes, some of excellent quality and from distant parts of Japan. The one she likes most has motifs of children’s day on it. She feels proud when she has so many cakes in the house and gives them to guests and family. Like many chugen gifts, there is no return to make. She is happy because these gifts reflect that other people think of her as kind and respectable, someone to whom they owe thanks and from whom they would not expect a return.

Hanako’s chugen serve the purpose of repaying debts and measuring obligation. It can take the form of symmetric reciprocity, with a return of a gift of a similar value, or asymmetric reciprocity with no return at all. Debts, however, are an ambiguous classification of emotions of gratitude, antagonism, social compliance between givers and recipients. Obligation is something that Hanako must aspire to. Obligations provide a framework of moral responses to relations that would otherwise be defined by the impersonality of the market. Hanako makes the alienating world of office and work more bearable with ‘obligations’. Relations she acquires with others through gifts would be too impersonal and alienating without obligations. Her chugen shopping is her means to create a sphere of relations of obligation that give faces, feelings and moral attributes to individuals who would be faceless and market-led. Hanako perceives commodities given as gifts such as cakes and sake as measuring kindness and feelings. She, however, uses the value of the commodity to measure status and rank. The obligation to make a gift is not just an obligation to acknowledge past debts. One of the advantages of chugen is that the recipient is not forced to unwrap the gift or consume it. He or she may decide to give it away or never use it. Giri gifts may not be ‘sentimental’ from a eurocentric point of view, but they are not appropriated as ‘personal’ gifts either. The recipients are aware that the chugen gift is not a ‘personal’ gift. The recipients’ use of a giri gift at chugen is very different from the use recipients make of other obligatory gifts, for example, children’s birthday toys (Chapter Four). Children’s toys are ‘personal’ gifts. The recipient must not throw them away until they have exhausted their capacity to provide prosperity and to ‘wrap’ notions of gender with it. The recipient must not keep it either. On the contrary, chugen giri gifts can be kept, unused and unwrapped for many years.

Mr.Mima in my first homestay opened his storehouse to show me all the chugen gifts he had there. He took a half unwrapped box and showed me the contents: 23 pieces of soap, one was missing because it had been used ‘to try’ the gift. Mr. Mima argued that perhaps he could give it to his nine-year-old daughter at her marriage. However, he then added: ‘by then, she might want new things’. That was the fate of chugen gifts. They remained partially opened, partially used, saved for a time of need.

Since most chugen gifts are not ‘personal’, the recipient is free to re-cycle them and use them again for making gifts. Marco’s case illustrates the difference between obligation and appropriation, personal gift and sentimental gift.

Marco, a young South American research student, was faced with the dilemma of having to give chugen gifts. After reading one of the many manuals about gifts in Japan, he understood that he had to thank his seniors for help given, the gift had to be expensive and well-wrapped. In relations of clear rank differential he should not expect a return. Bosses did not reciprocate. Accordingly Marco chose a gift that would reflect ‘thanks’, an expensive silver cup he imported from his country, and had it carefully wrapped. No return was made. Later in the year, the professor retired. At a farewell party, the professor opened up a cabinet where there was an array of gifts. He told the students to help themselves, ‘throwing’ the gifts out to them. Marco was furious to find ‘his’ gift in the cupboard being re-cycled. He had no consideration for the ‘gift’, thus no consideration for the giver. Marco’s feelings were really hurt. He knew that in giving the gift, he lost rights over the thing. Still, he argued ‘you would treat a gift with ‘respect’ and keep it.

The conventional approach to this problem is to say that Marco and his Professor were separated by a hierarchy that made gifts ‘obligatory’, void of sentimentality. However, Marco reflects Carriers (1995) idea that in western capitalism, not everything can be reduced to capitalism. People feel sentimental towards objects (see Chapter Two). In Japan, as Hanako and Azuma show, people have sentimental feelings towards objects including perishable goods such as cakes. Rank asymmetry is not a pre-condition for objects to be treated without sentimentality. Azuma’s father’s brother was revered as the elder, and hierarchy was an essential part of their relation.

The problem with chugen gifts is that most observers insist in analysing them as ‘gifts’. I will argue chugen ‘gifts’ of the kind Marco gave, which exemplify most gift exchange at firms and offices, are in fact ‘shopping’. They are very well wrapped and presented items of shopping. They can be used as ‘gifts’ because these items are wrapped several times. First, the commodity is wrapped (with plastic and cellophane, second, the wrapped commodity is re-wrapped with commercial papers, and finally, the gift is wrapped in noshigami papers. In a simplified way, in Carrier’s model Christmas shopping (which is seen as lacking sentimentality) proves that people can create a sphere of love in the face of a world of money. Shopping transforms commodities into gifts. Transposing this model, it is possible to argue that giri giving (which is also seen as lacking sentimentality), proves that people can create a sphere of impersonal obligations in the work sphere, thus creating a sphere of alienation within work. They also aim to transcend it by wrapping the whole process of exchange, from shopping to giving the gift. Chugen giving is responsible for converting obligations into shopping items, but wrapping is crucial in mystifying the commodity and mystifying the market.

In 1977 Morsbach defined a basic belief about gift exchange among the Japanese:

It can be expected that many gift-giving customs will prevail as long as on and giri (debt and obligation to repay) are strong and serve to hold society together (ibid: 132)

I discussed in Chapter Two how ‘giri’ is periodically rediscovered. I proposed in that chapter that giri was a reflection of the tension between the gift as a means to reproduce social worlds, and the gift as a means to transcend the smallness of such worlds for wider goals. Every now and then, ‘giri’ re-emerges, it fades, it re-emerges again. In 1996, nearly fifty years after Benedict’s account (1977) informants still reported changes in the perception of giri.

‘These things you ask about giri and obon... it is only the ojiisan to obaasan no jidai to kaishas no shiki, things that the generation of elders and big corporations do. I do not observe them. Another informant said: ‘My parents still do seibo, they spent many hours in Sogo deciding on their gifts. (...) it is not because of ‘giri’. I think it is just ‘orei’, they want to be polite and do what most people do.

The informants who said they did not observe giri, however, all said that gave giri gifts at Valentine’s Day. This was not a contradiction. They were speaking of different conceptions of giri. The giri of their parents had been the key to the reproduction of small, familiar worlds in firms and corporations when Japan was trying to recover from the losses of war. They represented the harsh and alienating conditions of work (workers are forced to use part of their salaries to give to bosses, who have already extracted their production) and the aims to transcend it (the boss was a father figure who took care of the employees). I will argue that Valentine giri is used for different purposes. Employees try to break from the alienating conditions at work (especially male dominance), without losing the protection of bosses. Giri is not about ‘obligation’ in the conventional sense, but a reflection of the tension of trying to achieve two goals which are antagonistic in principle.

Giri is at the root of many of the claims about the ‘uniqueness’ of Japanese society, and the miracle of its economic success while holding on to its traditions (Reischauer 1977, Kosaku 1992). This claim is not wrong in detecting the tension between two antagonistic principles, but to reduce it to ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ makes our task of making sense of it too difficult. What villagers do and say about giri and Valentine’s Day reflect more than ‘change’ in tradition. Giri, as expressed in the case of Valentine’s Day gifts, appears to have less to do with ‘tradition’ than with a way of conceptualising how men and women participate in gift exchange. As I will argue, Valentine’s Day gifts are a creative response to the tensions expressed through the idiom of giri.

[60] Bon is a festival to remember the souls of departed ancestors. Wives and families that do not live in the extended family system travel at this time of the year to their natal houses to offer gifts to the ancestors. Kamikatsu receives a great affluence of ‘returnees’ during obon. Although obon coincides with the traditional custom to repay debts at mid-summer, obon is no longer used to pay economic debts but only to acknowledge debts of gratitude accumulated during the year through kinship and laboral relations.
[61] There is no cash corners or branches of any bank in Kamikatsu. Most villagers prefer cash to other types of transactions and large amounts of cash are kept at home. Villagers have bank accounts in the only office of Katsuura town or in Tokushima city, but they mostly use it for savings. Most farmers use the post-office and Japan Agriculture for savings rather than Banks. The amount of bank transactions is thus limited. Instead of opening a branch, banks send delegates once a fortnight to Kamikatsu to deal with their customers. The town office leaves a room at the entrance of the office for farmers to come and settle and check accounts, withdraw from or lodge money to their bank accounts. Well-off villagers, do not like the idea of having to go to the town office, a public place, to set accounts. They prefer a more personalised business, thus, few households have private arrangements with the bank representative. Banks send their delegates to the houses, privately. Banks tend to give more expensive chugen gifts to these customers than the usual farmer than goes every fortnight to the town office.