THE INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT OF LOW FERTILITY

Abstract

Japan's very low fertility is set in the context of the ‘marriage package’ faced by never-married young people. The competition between the unmarried lifestyle and the traditional package of marital roles has led to delays in marriage and childbearing. The marriage package is discussed in terms of levels of and preferences for wife's education and employment, the division of household labor, the changing nature of marriage, and the rising risk of divorce. The extended portion of adult life spent unmarried and childless is also creating feedback loops at both the individual and societal level by providing new opportunities for innovative behaviors such as cohabitation.

Keywords:

• Japan
• marriage
• childbearing
• gender roles
• life-course

Acknowledgements

The analyses reported here were partially supported by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to the East-West Center (R01-HD042474), and a grant from Center for Global Partnership, The Japan Foundation, Ref. No. 95ACR-5636N. The 1994 National Survey on Work and Family Life was funded by Nihon University. The 2000 National Survey of Family and Economic Conditions was funded by the COE project of the Asian Financial Crisis and Its Macroeconomic Responses at Keio University, and also by a Grand-in-Aid for Specially Promoted Research (11CE2002) from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Gayle Yamashita, Sally Dai and Midea Kabamalan provided research assistance.

Notes

1. The total fertility rate indicates the average number of births that a woman would have if, hypothetically, she lived through the reproductive age span of 15–49 years experiencing the age-specific fertility rates observed in a particular calendar year.

2. Replacement-level fertility is typically defined as 2.1 births per woman, assuming modern low levels of mortality.

3. Women are much more likely to attend junior college than men. In 1970, only 35 percent of women advancing to higher education went to a four-year college or university. This rose to 65 percent in 2000. Among men, 93 percent of those advancing to higher education went to a four-year college or university in 1970, and this rose to 96 percent in 2000 (Japan Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology 2007).

4. It is important to note that increasingly, the lifetime employment guarantee is not part of the actual or implied contract between an employer and an employee who is hired for a ‘regular’ job. McDonald (2009) hypothesizes that this increased job insecurity will further postpone childbearing, but this hypothesis has yet to be empirically tested.

5. This refers to those who are neither employed nor in education or training. They constitute a small but growing proportion of the young adult population (Kadokura 2004).

6. This discussion of preference for wife's employment draws on research reported in Bumpass et al. (2007).

7. This section on household tasks is based on our work reported in Tsuya et al. (2005).

8. It is impossible to get satisfactory measures of childcare with standard questions on housework because of the extent to which childcare often overlaps with other tasks.

9. We do not think that this is simply a cultural response pattern of avoiding the expression of an opinion. In an earlier analysis of attitude items (Rindfuss et al. 2004), we found that even though substantial proportions responded in the middle category on any given item, there was little repetition of this response across items.

10. The results described here are analyzed in more detail in Rindfuss et al. (2004).