This lucid, hard-hitting book explores a central paradox of the Japanese economy: the relegation of women to low-paying, dead-end jobs in a workforce that depends on their labor to maintain its ...status as a world economic leader. Drawing upon historical materials, survey and statistical data, and extensive interviews in Japan, Mary Brinton provides an in-depth and original examination of the role of gender in Japan's phenomenal postwar economic growth.
Brinton finds that the educational system, the workplace, and the family in Japan have shaped the opportunities open to female workers. Women move in and out of the workforce depending on their age and family duties, a great disadvantage in a system that emphasizes seniority and continuous work experience. Brinton situates the vicious cycle that perpetuates traditional gender roles within the concept of human capital development, whereby Japanese society "underinvests" in the capabilities of women. The effects of this underinvestment are reinforced indirectly as women sustain male human capital through unpaid domestic labor and psychological support.
Brinton provides a clear analysis of a society that remains misunderstood, but whose economic transformation has been watched with great interest by the industrialized world.
This article challenges the implicit assumption of many cross-national studies that gender-role attitudes fall along a single continuum between traditional and egalitarian. The authors argue that ...this approach obscures theoretically important distinctions in attitudes and renders analyses of change over time incomplete. Using latent class analysis, they investigate the multidimensional nature of gender-role attitudes in 17 postindustrial European countries. They identify three distinct varieties of egalitarianism that they designate as liberal egalitarianism, egalitarian familism, and flexible egalitarianism. They show that while traditional gender-role attitudes have precipitously and uniformly declined in accordance with the “rising tide” narrative toward greater egalitarianism, the relative prevalence of different egalitarianisms varies markedly across countries. Furthermore, they find that European nations are not converging toward one dominant egalitarian model but rather, remain differentiated by varieties of egalitarianism.
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Research has examined how the gendered household division of labor may deter the transition to second birth. However, little research has investigated how workplace norms influence men's household ...work. This paper takes into account labor market structure, workplace norms, and the legal environment governing working conditions to contextualize men's contribution to household labor and its effect on transition to second birth. Using data from the Japanese Longitudinal Survey of Adults in the 21st Century (2002 Cohort), we employ fixed-effects models to estimate the effect of workplace norms on men's contribution to household work and the effect of men's household work hours on transition to second birth. Japanese male university graduates in large firms do a smaller share of household labor than other men. These men are subject to workplace norms prevalent in firm-internal labor markets, which have been supported by Japanese Supreme Court rulings. These norms influence men's allocation of time between the workplace and the home. Moreover, analysis of the transition to second birth indicates that husband's share of household work is an important predictor of second birth, especially for dual-earner couples. Our empirical results suggest that unless changes are made in Japanese employment law and workplace norms, dual-earner couples in particular will continue to face difficulties proceeding to a second birth. This paper demonstrates how the economic and cultural context can create disincentives for men to contribute to household labor, which in turn lowers the probability of transition to second birth.
Lost in Transition tells the story of the 'lost generation' that came of age in Japan's deep economic recession in the 1990s. The book argues that Japan is in the midst of profound changes that have ...had an especially strong impact on the young generation. The country's renowned 'permanent employment system' has unraveled for young workers, only to be replaced by temporary and insecure forms of employment. The much-admired system of moving young people smoothly from school to work has frayed. The book argues that these changes in the very fabric of Japanese postwar institutions have loosened young people's attachment to school as the launching pad into the world of work and loosened their attachment to the workplace as a source of identity and security. The implications for the future of Japanese society - and the fault lines within it - loom large.
Ezra F. Vogel (July 11, 1930–December 20, 2020) was one of America’s foremost experts on Asia, mastering the Japanese and Chinese languages and contributing important scholarly works on both ...countries, and on their relationships with each other and with the world. Starting from modest roots in an immigrant family in a small town in Ohio, he came to Harvard in 1953 to train as a sociologist. He then shifted his focus to Asia, spending almost the entirety of his life at Harvard.Vogel had a dramatic impact around the world, not only through his scholarship and the students he trained, but also through his friendship and mentoring of journalists, diplomats, business executives, and foreign leaders as well as through his public policy advice and devotion to institution building, at Harvard as well as nationally and internationally. Active until the end, his sudden death provoked outpourings of gratitude and grief from countless people whose lives he had affected. The present volume, containing fond reminiscences from 155 diverse individuals, conveys what was so extraordinary about the character and life of Ezra Vogel.
Singlehood in contemporary Japan Brinton, Mary C.; Mun, Eunmi; Hertog, Ekaterina
Demographic research,
2021, Volume:
44
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Late age at marriage and rising rates of singlehood increasingly characterize East Asian societies. For Japan, these are major contributors to the very low birth rate.
We analyze two unique data ...sets: dating records covering a two-year period from one of Japan's largest marriage agencies and in-depth interviews with 30 highly-educated Japanese singles. The longitudinal nature of the quantitative data allows us to test hypotheses about how single men's and women's preferences for partners' characteristics adjust over time. The qualitative data provides a more fine-grained look at Japanese singles' partner preferences.
We employ fixed-effects regression models to analyze Japanese men's and women's preferences for the relative and absolute education, income, and age of potential marriage partners.
Both the quantitative and qualitative data suggest that Japanese women continue to highly value men's income-earning capacity. Men, in contrast, value a partner with moderate income-earning potential. Women's and men's preferences for partner's education are somewhat weaker, and women broaden their educational preference over time.
Japanese men's and women's preferences for a potential partner's characteristics are largely consistent with Becker's theory of gender-role specialization. But we also find evidence consistent with Oppenheimer's expectation that men are coming to value women's income-earning capacity more highly than in the past.
We use a unique Japanese data set featuring dating records over a two-year period to examine the appropriateness of theories of marital sorting proposed by Becker and Oppenheimer. Our quantitative analysis is complemented by in-depth interviews with Japanese singles.
In the sociological literature on social mobility, the long-standing convention has been to assume that intergenerational reproduction takes one of two forms: a categorical form that has parents ...passing on a big-class position to their children or a gradational form that has parents passing on their socioeconomic standing. These approaches ignore in their own ways the important role that occupations play in transferring opportunities from one generation to the next. In new analyses of nationally representative data from the United States, Sweden, Germany, and Japan, the authors show that (a) occupations are an important conduit for social reproduction, (b) the most extreme rigidities in the mobility regime are only revealed when analyses are carried out at the occupational level, and (c) much of what shows up as big-class reproduction in conventional mobility analyses is in fact occupational reproduction in disguise.
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Fertility ideals remain centered on two children per woman in most postindustrial societies, presenting a puzzle for demographers interested in explaining very low fertility. This article explores ...the conditions producing a gap between fertility ideals and intentions among highly educated young women and men in four postindustrial countries. We employ in-depth interviews to analyze reasoning about fertility ideals and intentions in two countries with very low fertility (Japan and Spain) and two with slightly higher fertility (the United States and Sweden). We find that American and Swedish female interviewees are more likely than those in Japan and Spain to cite work/family conflict as a reason for their ideals/intentions gap. Our results also suggest that gender inequality is more important in generating low fertility intentions among highly educated interviewees in Japan than Spain. Taken together, these findings suggest complexities in how gender inequality affects fertility intentions among the highly educated in postindustrial contexts.
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