The structure of regional child-rearing developed by a naval harbour city - from the analysis of oral history and architecture/urban living space

Abstract

In Japan, the birth rate is currently the lowest it has ever been. This has prompted researchers to look into the country's environments and attitudes of raising children. Associate Professor Chiyo Eguchi, Faculty of Nursing, Hiroshima International University, Japan, is looking at the issues surrounding family and child-rearing environments and has interviewed families across generations to clarify such relationships and environments. Her project is shedding light on how and why different localities in Japan have different child-rearing approaches and environments, such as families of three generations living together in large, sturdy houses in snowy areas. Eguchi has also discovered historical instances of rich child-rearing traditions in cities, such as in Kure near Hiroshima. In order to decipher whether the local child-rearing environment is influenced by the peculiarities of a particular region, Eguchi is working to clarify the characteristics of Kure and how these peculiarities relate to a modern city. As such, she is interviewing residents of Kure who lived there during the war to gain a sense of their life stories and what life was like for them as children. Positive experiences of living in close proximity to family and neighbours were recounted. Using this information, Eguchi and the team have adopted an analytical approach to unravelling the relationship between the narrative of an individual and their specific living space and the researchers plan to extrapolate the findings into a modern-day urban environment