This book explores the employment of Japanese women born in the 1960s and 1970s who experienced childbirth and raised children in the 1990s and the early 2000s. During this period, the Japanese economy experienced a severe recession. It has affected the firm-specific internal labour market and on employment practices, which in turn are thought to have greatly influenced Japanese women’s employment. On the other hand, the fertility rate declined and social policies to support women’s employment began to be implemented after the 1990s. This book explores how these labour market structure and social policies interact to affect Japanese women’s employment. The book first analyses the employment patterns of women born between the 1920s and 1970s and examines how they have varied among different birth cohorts. Then, the employment behaviour of women before and after childbirth through the post-child-rearing period, as well as the working career of single mothers are explored for women born in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on the data analyses, the concluding part of this book discusses how the labour market structure and social policies during the 1990s and early 2000s interactively influenced employment behaviour of Japanese women, and some suggestions are put forward for changing women’s employment during the child-rearing years.

Combining work and family remains a major challenge for married women in contemporary Japan, and it’s not uncommon for them to quit working when starting a family. Single mothers, by contrast, almost always work, regardless of the age of their children. Despite their eagerness to support themselves and their children through employment, their average income remains low and many live on a household budget close to the poverty line. This book examines how the difficult living conditions facing single mothers in Japan highlight not only the challenges they face in earning a family wage and managing the work-family balance, but also reveals the class dimensions of family life in contemporary Japan. The need to make ends meet with few resources means that mothers may find it difficult to uphold the lifestyle they may consider as most appropriate for the upbringing of their children, and that they may have to choose between their presence at home, in line with the ideal of the middle-class housewife and mother, or devoting more time to earning an income that can pay for a good education. Social class, in this case, is not just a matter of education, occupation, or income, but is also expressed by mothers’ approaches to their children’s’ upbringing and future opportunities in education and employment. Based on life history interviews with single mothers, this study examines the gendered meanings of social class and social achievement and the role of maternal practices in shaping their children’s future life trajectories.

Japanese women, singled out for their commitment to the role of housewife and mother, are now postponing marriage and bearing fewer children. Japan has become one of the least fertile and fastest aging countries in the world. Why are so many Japanese women opting out of family life? To answer this question, the author draws on in-depth interviews and extensive survey data to examine Japanese mothers' perspectives and experiences of marriage, parenting, and family life. The goal is to understand how, as introspective, self-aware individuals, these women interpret and respond to the barriers and opportunities afforded within the structural and ideological contexts of contemporary Japan. The findings suggest a need for changes in the structure of the workplace and the education system to provide women with the opportunity to find a fulfilling balance of work and family life.

Sexuality, Maternity, and (Re)productive Futures explores how contemporary Japanese female speculative fiction writers have challenged historical inequalities of sex, gender difference, and family roles by imagining alternative worlds where sexes are fluid and childbearing crosses the boundaries of male/female, biological/bioengineered, and human/nonhuman.

Since Japan’s economic recession began in the 1990s, the female workforce has experienced revolutionary changes as greater numbers of women have sought to establish careers. Employment trends indicate that increasingly white-collar professional women are succeeding in breaking through the "glass ceiling", as digital technologies blur and redefine work in spatial, gendered, and ideological terms. This book examines what motivates Japanese women to pursue professional careers in the contemporary neoliberal economy, and how they reconfigure notions of selfhood while doing so. It analyses how professional women contest conventional notions of femininity in contemporary Japan and in turn, negotiate new gender roles and cultural assumptions about women, whilst reorganizing the Japanese workplace and wider socio-economic relationships. Further, the book explores how professional women create new social identities through the mutual conditioning of structure and self, and asks how women come to understand their experiences; how their actions change the gendering of the workforce; and how their lives shape the economic, political, social, and cultural landscapes of this post-industrial nation. Based on extensive fieldwork, Career Women in Contemporary Japan will have broad appeal across a range of disciplines including Japanese culture and society, gender and family studies, women’s studies, anthropology, ethnology and sociology.

This book explores the employment of Japanese women born in the 1960s and 1970s who experienced childbirth and raised children in the 1990s and the early 2000s. During this period, the Japanese economy experienced a severe recession. It has affected the firm-specific internal labour market and on employment practices, which in turn are thought to have greatly influenced Japanese women’s employment. On the other hand, the fertility rate declined and social policies to support women’s employment began to be implemented after the 1990s. This book explores how these labour market structure and social policies interact to affect Japanese women’s employment. The book first analyses the employment patterns of women born between the 1920s and 1970s and examines how they have varied among different birth cohorts. Then, the employment behaviour of women before and after childbirth through the post-child-rearing period, as well as the working career of single mothers are explored for women born in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on the data analyses, the concluding part of this book discusses how the labour market structure and social policies during the 1990s and early 2000s interactively influenced employment behaviour of Japanese women, and some suggestions are put forward for changing women’s employment during the child-rearing years.

Divided into 15 chapters, this book provides the reader with an insight into certain representations of mothers and motherhood in history and today’s societies in some areas of the world, notably in Britain and Asia. Key facts about the history of motherhood are presented, together with the use of very recent notions and phrases portraying ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothers. An analysis of the concepts of naming and blaming, along with regret with respect to mothers in 21st century societies, provides food for thought. Other issues addressed are varied and numerous: the politics of early intervention, feminist critique, mothers with disabilities and mothers of disabled children, incarcerated mothers, surrogate mothers, teenage mothers, lesbian mothers, and mothering in Eastern Asia, namely in China, Japan, and Korea. Interestingly, both visual arts and literature play a crucial role in this analysis. The publication will appeal to students, academics, researchers, and the general public interested in and seeking to comprehend the shifts that have occurred over time in connection with the vast and inexhaustible subject of motherhood and mothers – a private and public matter. Readers are also provided with a rich reference section dealing with the latest publications on the issues tackled by prominent academics and researchers in human geography, women’s studies, sociology, gender studies, contemporary history, and the arts.

As is the case in Western industrialized countries, Japan is seeing a rise in the number of unmarried couples, later marriages, and divorces. What sets Japan apart, however, is that the percentage of children born out of wedlock has hardly changed in the past fifty years. This book provides the first systematic study of single motherhood in contemporary Japan. Seeking to answer why illegitimate births in Japan remain such a rarity, Hertog spent over three years interviewing single mothers, academics, social workers, activists, and policymakers about the beliefs, values, and choices that unmarried Japanese mothers have. Pairing her findings with extensive research, she considers the economic and legal disadvantages these women face, as well as the cultural context that underscores family change and social inequality in Japan. This is the only scholarly account that offers sufficient detail to allow for extensive comparisons with unmarried mothers in the West.

What are people’s life experiences in present-day Japan? This timely volume addresses fundamental questions vital to understanding Japan in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Its chapters collectively reveal a questioning of middle-class ideals once considered the essence of Japaneseness. In the postwar model household a man was expected to obtain a job at a major firm that offered life-long employment; his counterpart, the “professional” housewife, managed the domestic sphere and the children, who were educated in a system that provided a path to mainstream success. In the past twenty years, however, Japanese society has seen a sharp increase in precarious forms of employment, higher divorce rates, and a widening gap between haves and have-nots. Contributors draw on rich, nuanced fieldwork data collected during the 2000s to examine work, schooling, family and marital relations, child rearing, entertainment, lifestyle choices, community support, consumption and waste, material culture, well-being, aging, death and memorial rites, and sexuality. The voices in these pages vary widely: They include schoolchildren, teenagers, career women, unmarried women, young mothers, people with disabilities, small business owners, organic farmers, retirees, and the elderly.

The second edition of this comprehensive study of recent Japanese history now includes the author's expert assessment of the effects of the earthquake and tsunami, including the political and environmental consequences of the Fukushima reactor meltdown. Fully updated to include a detailed assessment of the aftermath of the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami Shows how the nuclear crisis at Fukushima was an accident waiting to happen Includes detailed discussion of Japan's energy policy, now in flux after the mishandling of the Fukushima crisis Analyzes Japan's 'Lost Decades', why jobs and families are less stable, environmental policies, immigration, the aging society, the US alliance, the imperial family, and the 'yakuza' criminal gangs Authoritative coverage of Japanese history over the last two decades, one of the country's most tumultuous periods