International Marriage in Japan: A Strategy to Maintain Rural Farm Households

Abstract

The traditional Japanese family structure still persists today in Yamagata prefecture, according to the analyses of demography and the family. Rural farm households there, however, were in a critical situation in maintaining traditional stem families. So, a countermeasure was developed, to bring foreign brides into the area. The marriage “market” there had become extremely imbalanced with an acute shortage of marriageable women. One of the major factors contributing to the declining fertility rate in Yamagata is a lower marriage rate. In fact, the rate for men who have not married by 50 years of age in Yamagata is nearly one in five today (1960, 1.12 %; 2010, 18.71 %). Thus, in the mid-1980s, foreign brides started to be brought into Yamagata, initially through municipal efforts.

Of the total number of newly married couples, the proportion with a foreign spouse has increased dramatically over the years (1965, 0.44 %; 1990, 3.55 %; 2005, 5.81 %; and 2012, 3.50 %). Foreign brides now constitute a majority, rather than grooms in international marriages (1965, 25.7 %; 1990, 38.0 %; 2012, 72.7 %). These foreign brides come primarily from three regions in Asia, namely, China, the Philippines, and North and South Korea (in 2012, 41.7 %, 20.5 %, and 17.5 %, respectively).

In-depth studies of foreign brides in several rural farming municipalities in Yamagata prefecture proved the existence of a high correlation between the proportion of foreign residents and that of three-generation households. Stated differently, foreign brides in the international marriage today seem to be a driving force to maintain the traditional multigenerational household in the rural farming regions of Yamagata prefecture.

The first half of this chapter is an excerpt of the paper written by the present author entitled “Marriage as an International Migration,” in Elli Heikkila and Daniel Rauhut, eds. Marriage Migration (Institute of Migration, Finland, 2014) with permission and with statistics updated. The second half of the chapter, however, focuses on international marriage in Japan as a strategy to maintain rural farm households by incorporating the new report on the “current state of Yamagata prefecture” published in March 2014.