I’m going off the basis that every parent in Japanese culture can’t be awesome and that there must be some adult children that simply don’t get along with their father or their mother for various reasons. Sure, they might take care of them in old age out of respect, but at the same time resent their relationship with them. How would Japanese culture dictate they handle it, especially if they live with them as so many families might?
https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/14zji6s/how_do_japanese_deal_with_a_parent_they_dont_like/
3 comments
They usually just stop communicating. There are a lot of elderly people living alone in Japan because their children abandoned them.
Firstly, not all Japanese think alike and there isn’t a consensus.
Not being Japanese, there is a bunch of media which depict family life, some of which is probably more or less true to life/relatable. Two movies of note are Tokyo Story (東京物語) and Still Walking (歩いても歩いても). They pair well as stories about parents dissatisfied with their adult children. Neither story feels too unrealistic and voice a few real-world struggles.
My best guess for the real world is that some families go no-contact, while others might feel too entangled/indebted to their families to extract themselves from the situation.
When you finally figure out Japan, it’s too late to leave.