Japan's Women Opt Out of Marriage
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Or you can view it as the sacrifice of the private sphere (family, children, home and hearth) at the altar of the economic sphere.
I suppose I view it as a bit of both. I certainly don't like the idea of people being forced into marriage. But I'm also skeptical of the rejection of marriage. I don't think a career can replace a family. The reason I have a career is so I can have a family.
A lot of people in their 20s seem to think that their dayjob is actively involved with "making the world a better place" and will lead to fulfillment. I think "brainwashing" is a fairly accurate word to describe that mentality.
It's, by and large, because those are not the men that women select to have children with. When women consistently choose the man with the six figure salary, but that implies working long hours, what follows is predictable.
There is also a high degree of adverse selection there because a woman can't tell how much a man will help with the children before she has the children, by which point the father is already chosen. So they choose based on what they do know (e.g. salary) which is inversely correlated with that.
If we look at top 50% highest earners among men and compare with the bottom 50%, who has:
Highest Social status. Has more children. Bigger social support system. Live longer. Better health. Feeling of happiness and fulfillment.
For comparison do the same with women and take the top and bottom 50% and collect the same data.
From this simple data driven study we can prove if there exist an incentive in the form of pure outcomes between focusing on activities that raise income compared to activities of social value but without any monetary rewards. We also get a gendered perspective on the question.
Could you expand on what you mean by this? Are you referring to private corporations "making the world a better place" by selling products?
I work in public health research, and my day job indirectly (but not that indirectly) leads to reductions in infant mortality rates. Should that not be fulfilling?
Or you can view this as a result of men treating their wives like their caretakers.
For all the problems the US has, one very good thing it has going for it is that, in many (most?) social circles, it is expected that men will help out and support their wives and families beyond just earning a paycheck. This chart comes from a study that shows how men do about twice as much housework as they did in 1976, while women do less: https://www.nsf.gov/news/mmg/media/images/housework2_h.jpg . Many companies now give as much time for paternity leave as for maternity leave. TBH when that trend first started I didn't understand it: "But men didn't actually have the baby!" I thought. But by equalizing the time off, it takes the burden (and expectation) off the woman for doing all the childcare, with the related harm this can do to a woman's career.
Devoting your life to your family? That's slavery. Devoting your life to a corporation? That's emancipation.
The reason is nothing but for the lack of money. We, the average Japanese, cannot afford to have a child anymore. We just barely afford to have a life for themselves.
Why did we have to have a marriage? Because of the children. Because in the Japanese society, the children is assumed that they have a parent consists of one male and one female in marriage relationship.
Since we cannot afford to have a child, there is no reason to marriage anymore.
What other functions the marriage offer?
Asset management and inheritance? No. We can't afford to have a reserve or real estate. There is no use for that.
Bonding the families? No, as rural areas are more and more abandoned and everybody concentrate toward a few big cities, there is no traditional bonding of the families in one area.
Sex? Well, Not anymore. Japanese marriage system assume that the marriage is a exclusive sex relationship between single male and single female. It support very narrow traditional sexuality and excluding today's most of the sexuality.
The marriage system is now outdated. Ironically, the traditional marriage system is one of the cause of birth decline. It's an obstacle. Some people still want to have a child driven by natural instinct, but the current Japanese society assume a marriage between a male and a female who share their asset as the one, agree exclusive sexual relationship. Not following that pattern and you have huge negative impact on tax, school, health insurance and everything which makes those who want to have a child but don't agree on traditional marriage system holding to have a baby.
Conclusion: The marriage is outdated.
I suspect part of it is just there's stuff to do 24/7. If you have internet access, you can read, educate yourself (with or without credentials), talk to people around the world, watch porn etc etc any time of the day or night.
A former hippy once told me "TV shut off at 9pm. There wasn't anything else to do but sex and drugs."
We have the opposite of that. There are so many things to do, lots of people seem to be forgoing sex. Because: Meh.
Of course orphanage also works, but hard to imagine it is the ideal structure, thou it worked for Turkish janissary (there are probably plenty of other examples from history) and now China also trying it with minorities.
Children are not as expensive as one imagine, you might have to give up the most expensive phone/car luxury etc. But just ask any elderly if it worth it. If your mind thinking more like assets, children has the biggest appreciation value over anything.
And it is clearly false that marriage is a sufficient condition.
With today's variety of sexuality and values, that idea is also outdated.
>Children are not as expensive as one imagine...
Today's average Japanese young generations barely live with any savings. If they have savings, they are living with parents or very lucky. That means they can't even afford to double the food cost.
Children requires more than food. A private room for example. Children deserve a privacy so they deserve a private room. But the housing price is too high. You can't afford to have extra rooms. You can't afford to rent a house with a lot of rooms and you can't afford to have a real estate. If you can't have a money, your only option is to live in a rural less demanding area where the house price is cheaper. But it requires 1.5 hours between your house and office. You work 8 hours per day and waste 3 hours just inside the train.
Education cost is also steadily rising as well as tax. my parent used to say they pay their tuition by working themselves. Sure, when they were a student, school cost was like one week worth of work. Thanks to the lower school cost, higher wage, and most importantly, less tax! It's like straight out from the Old Economy Steve meme.
Which isn't a Japanese only problem either. The countries which has less birth rate and marriage problem are also the ones with better child benefits, health care and education.
Give millennials more money that they actually receive and you'll see people take marriage as a choice again
* Japan’s Working Mothers: Record Responsibilities, Little Help From Dads
* In Japan, More Women Fight to Use Their Own Surnames
* Japan Desperately Needs More Day Care Workers. New Mothers Need Not Apply.
* A Princess in a Cage
Seems like NYT has a mission to liberate woman in Japan...
I am really skeptical of this ideology that affirms work and a wage as some sort of spiritual liberation.
What economic system do you propose that has the most individual independence?
All of the greatest problems looming on our horizon are tied to how we organize production and consumption.
Because I asked about it, and you answered by confidently describing it, instead of saying "it doesn't exist."
The OP means that if you earn your own money, then you do not depend on your spouse for income. This provides you with more freedom than you would otherwise have. Both because you can divorce and still have income, and because your spouse can no long argue "This money is earned entirely by me, so I have complete discretion over how it will be spent".
'Liberation' has meant that for the majority of women, if they want to raise a family without financial disadvantage, either must work or be very choosy over their husband's earning potential / wealth.
Is that really an increase in choice? Most people do not have the financial cushion to stay at home, even if that's what they really want.
Liberation, however, is strongly tied to economic opportunities. Historically, as is cited in TFA, women got married often for financial security and stability.
The other reasons are sex, social pressure and actually feeling in love and marriage being expected expression of that.
Men did not want to marry either, but did so out of societal pressure.
Both Man and Woman did not want to marry but did so nevertheless, due to the structure of the society.
What's the alternatives?
Shall we view marriage as some kind of instinctive behavior?
Or some kind of rational decision supported by some game theory?
Men married later then women. That way men got more years of freedom. That was normal.
Women wanted to marry, because economy, because married women had higher social status, to leave parents house, because that was expected of them anyway etc.
Single men were somewhat discriminated against too in employment situations and married men had higher social status.
Nevertheless, stereotype at time was girl trying to force marriage from male afraid of commitment. Perfectly reasonable answer to question about that exactly.
For every economically free woman there seem to be 5 more that would prefer the man to pay for every date or assume other traditional roles, no matter how it is rationalized. (My experiences in the Americas and most European cultures.) In this article about Japan that seems like an accurate distribution, given that it mentions only 1 out of 7 subscribe to any of the logic/circumstances the article is written about.
To be a male ally for the economically free and liberated woman is almost the worst form of altruism.
The incentives are completely misaligned. All you can do is learn about what the sensibilities are, never publicly disagree with them on record or around a woman striving for these ideals, but do the complete opposite with the much larger population of women that expects a certain traditional heteronormative gender role.
(The goal, of course, is to be an eligible mate - or not ineligible - for all of them)
>For every economically free woman there seem to be 5 more that would prefer the man to pay for every date or assume other traditional roles, no matter how it is rationalized.
Women, like men, are individuals possessed of a diverse set of opinions and beliefs, they do not operate according to a consensus algorithm. To expect "consensus" among an entire gender on a topic like feminist identity and inter (and intra) gender relationship dynamics, particularly at the level of social and cultural expectations, is sexist and diminishing.
>The goal, of course, is to be an eligible mate - or not ineligible - for all of them
No, the goal is, or should be, to support human rights, because that is what womens' rights are. Men should be allies of women and of feminism because the belief that women have the right to bodily, social, political and career autonomy is the morally correct position to hold, not as a pretext to maximizing their chances of getting laid.
Many people deciding what feminism is are speaking on behalf of their whole gender and leave no oxygen for others to point out the lack of consensus on these matters. Its the same filter bubble seen on other polarizing topics, your echo chamber agrees with you and everyone that disagrees is an irreconcilable deplorable.
I agree people should be treated as individuals
Lack of consensus accurately describes my frustration
If anyone is curious, the statistics for the U.S. look similar. https://i.redd.it/qn25qiv8fawz.png
Even stay at home mothers without jobs do an insane amount of work here, with husbands expecting home made meals. This is all anecdotal of course, but I hear Japanese husbands almost never participate in any household chores. Wives don’t even bother asking as they are afraid of being seen as incompetent at doing housework. I can only imagine the schedules for working women! Mind you, Japan is not a society where hiring others to watch your kids is a common thing. Women typically do most of the kid raising on their own, with husbands only around on weekends and holidays.
I respect that you admit it's anecdotal, but this goes well into data gleaned from self selection bias.
So obviously the article's allusions to Japanese sexism must be taken with reservation.
Until everybody does it. Then you need that shift just to be able to afford to live where you would have without it, and to be in the better school district you need a full time job as a second income. Then everybody does that and we have the two income trap, and the option to just be a stay at home parent evaporates because the other families have two incomes and you're bidding against them for positional goods.
And it's no answer to ask each parent to work half as much and then split the child rearing duties, because that's still an economic disadvantage relative to the family where both parents work full time. It's even worse than having one full time worker and one full time parent, because one full time job pays more than two half time jobs due to the reduced training costs and other administrative overhead.
So instead it creates the requirement that women become full time workers in addition to full time parents, only to have the same quality of life and economic stability they used to have as stay at home parents. And we see fertility rates and female happiness on the decline since the 1970s.
A possible solution might be to fight against scarcity in existing positional goods. So make housing costs low enough that anyone can afford to own a home even with one income or two part time incomes (and build lots more homes to make that possible), untie school quality from housing and let people send their kids to any school they want to as long as they can get the kids there, etc. Another (complementary) option is to increase support for families with children, e.g. bigger child tax deductions/credits. But we clearly need to do something -- we shouldn't just pretend it isn't happening because it's politically inconvenient.
It's a very smart way to organize a society if you're a landlord using artificial scarcity to extract rents equal to the productive value created by everyone else. For everyone else it's warm dung.
It's not even economically efficient because it undervalues non-wage labor, of which child rearing is a prominent example that we are now under-producing as a result.
> reimbursement for all kids related expenses
Reimbursement overcomplicates things for no good reason and creates a lot of perverse incentives to overpay for services etc. Just choose an amount per child and make that the amount of the child tax credit.
But that's somewhat separate from the main thing driving the competition, which is artificial housing scarcity (and artificial scarcity in general). That may be the single most pressing problem facing us today, outside of climate change.
Not only housing is expensive, there is a good chance to lose this expensive house over a divorce.
A woman shouldn't have to be a homemaker and a man shouldn't have to be a breadwinner but it's fine if they choose those things for themselves in a society that will accept and respect them regardless.
Or people grew up watching their parents regret starting one too soon and want to avoid that mistake.
People who talk about women being more selective makes me wonder if there's an ulterior motive to choosing that hypothesis. Sour grapes?
Sexually speaking, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
There's much more economic uncertainty for the average family as a result of two things.
1. Corporations innovating the labor market and successfully squeezing increasing amounts of wealth out of the workforce: successful union busting, ever more cleverly exploitative labor contracts, the gig economy, unpredictable scheduling, metrics and surveillance, etc.
2. Fewer funds proportionally available to labor thanks to increasing wealth capture by a tiny minority.
It's not only expensive, but it's statistically difficult to overcome the uncertainty and establish a homestead you can believe will prove stable over a kid-raising time frame.
It's easy to understand why people are hesitant to start families in such family-unfriendly economic conditions.
Nobody should be forced to get married or have children if they don’t want to. But if we can alleviate some of the risks/down sides to having children, I think we will see more people choosing to start families and also having more children per family.
This is a bad idea. Russian government have already tried that, and the result was that less wealthy people (mostly alcoholic and drug addicts) started to literally make children to receive subsidies and spend them on themselves.
It's fun to me how Google search results differ for "to make a child for subsidies" and for this same phrase translated to Russian, where it has already became a phenomenon.
Is there enough data to study this now, just to confirm (or accept completely different findings)
...but I wouldn't hold my breath on the NYT writing an article on how rough Japanese men have it.
The problem hasn't changed much.
That was just the first link, I'm sure there are more, but i'm not going to do your homework for you.
A lot of people in the US (both men and women) do not have the flexibility to take time off from work whenever needed. Also in terms of “safety net” - Japan offers affordable (and soon to be free) daycare for households where both parents work full time.
The long work hours Japan is famous are a strain on families to be sure. But with the government actively working to change the culture and also the sheer necessity due to a large percentage of households where both parents work, I think things are changing quickly.
As others have noted, the US is experiencing similar declines in marriage and birth rates. And unlike in Japan where the government is actively working to address the issue, the US government does not seem capable of making necessary reforms to social welfare/child care systems right now and is even actively making things worse by discouraging immigration.
I think it's a little premature to assume that the population of Japan is going to die out. One of the points mentioned is that few Japanese women have children out of wedlock - I imagine this will change as time moves on and fewer couples marry, similar to other countries.
However, I think the main challenge with posing the question "have there been other human cultures that die out due to a lack of desire to procreate" is that culture is quite an ephemeral thing - what would it mean to die out?
As an aside, is strawman a verb these days? Language is hard to keep up with.
True, but the fact remains that the fertility rate is below the population replacement rate as well.
Do you have evidence of a < 2.0 fertility rate reversing itself in human cultures?
But it wasn’t too long ago that people were afraid of exponential population growth leading to wars and suffering and the end of civilization.
Now the global population has started to stabilize and concerns have shifted toward shrinking populations in developed countries. I don’t pretend to know how things will end up, but it’s not a stretch to imagine scenarios where the populations in developed countries could stop shrinking and stabilize.
* Assumes that falling marriage/birth rate is a bad thing. But there are some benefits as well such as fewer unwanted births and unhappy marriages, less environmental strain, affordable housing costs, low unemployment, etc.
* Assumes that only men “stubbornly hold onto traditional mores”. Surely women do this too.
* Assumes cultural differences in Japan are “dated” (and therefore inferior) compared to elsewhere.
Note that I’m not even a cultural relativist. I do think that some cultural traits are objectively better than others. But you do need to be careful to avoid bias.
Finally I’d just point out that marriage and birth rates are on the decline in much of the developed world. Which leads me to believe that the cause must more universal than a single population of men refusing to abandon their stubborn traditions.
Right now, only the poor and the wealthy are procreating.