Single Women and Their Households in Contemporary Japan

Abstract

State promotion of particular kinds of gender relations and household structures in Japan since the post-war period has constructed the reproductive family as an official ‘“absorber” of economic and social risks’ (Takeda 2008: 161). While the last three decades in Japan have seen the introduction of legislation and policy designed to encourage women’s participation in the paid workforce, a gendered labour division operates whereby household work and child-rearing are seen primarily as women’s work. Women who are neither mothers nor wives, and particularly women who are mothers but not wives, occupy a peripheral space in dominant constructions of the family as the basic social unit. Single women, particularly those who live alone, challenge what MacKenzie has called ‘conjugal order’, referring to ‘the broader social norms associated with marriage and the family, including the privileging of heterosexual sex’ (2010: 205). However, as unmarried women may also be workers and/or unpaid carers, their contributions to the household and broader economy are not insignificant. In contemporary Japan, an ageing low-birth rate society where increasing numbers of women (and men) are remaining unmarried, the households and consumption patterns of single women are increasingly significant.