Tough Choices

Bearing an Illegitimate Child in Japan

Ekaterina Hertog

• Editorial: Stanford University Press
• Año: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780804772396
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Démographie

As is the case in Western industrialized countries, Japan is seeing a rise in the number of unmarried couples, later marriages, and divorces. What sets Japan apart, however, is that the percentage of children born out of wedlock has hardly changed in the past fifty years. This book provides the first systematic study of single motherhood in contemporary Japan.

Seeking to answer why illegitimate births in Japan remain such a rarity, Hertog spent over three years interviewing single mothers, academics, social workers, activists, and policymakers about the beliefs, values, and choices that unmarried Japanese mothers have. Pairing her findings with extensive research, she considers the economic and legal disadvantages these women face, as well as the cultural context that underscores family change and social inequality in Japan. This is the only scholarly account that offers sufficient detail to allow for extensive comparisons with unmarried mothers in the West.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

A 14-YEAR-OLD junior high school student from a middle class family finds herself unmarried and pregnant. It does not take long until her parents, her friends, her classmates, and everyone around her realize what has happened. Her parents, the gynecologist who confirms the pregnancy, and the school authorities all recommend an abortion as she is too young, needs to continue with her education, and would find it exceptionally hard to support herself and her child.Yet the young expectant mother is unwavering in her decision and eventually gives birth to her child outside marriage.

This is not a story of another teenage mother in the United States or the UK, where the numbers of such women have increased dramatically in postwar years, and where many people believe a whole host of social ills can be traced to the lapses of judgment of poor unmarried women who bear children they can ill afford.¹ The girl in fact is called Miki and she is the protagonist of 14sai no Haha (A 14-Year-Old Mother), one of the most popular,² as well as most controversial, Japanese television dramas in 2006. In contrast to many Western countries, unwed mothers in Japan are very rare and teenage unwed mothers even more so.Yet, for months after the last episode had aired, the drama continued to attract considerable attention. Part of the audience clearly believed that the drama, if in an exaggerated way, somehow reflected social ills that young people in contemporary Japan are exposed to. In a survey by the National Congress of Parents and Teachers Association of Japan it was ranked as the second program parents were least willing to have their junior high school children watch.³ It also won the highest TV drama award of the National Association of Commercial Broadcasters in Japan in 2007 for it was judged to portray well the reality of an ordinary family and what can happen to it, thereby conveying an important social message.⁴

The National Association of Commercial Broadcasters in Japan also recommended the drama for families with children.⁵

In reality in 2005 only forty-two girls in Japan who were fourteen or younger gave birth, almost an order of magnitude less than in England and Wales when weighted by population size.⁶ In Japan, 2 percent of all children were born outside wedlock in 2005 compared to 43 percent in the UK (2005) and 43 percent in the United States (2004).⁷ Given this rarity, it is striking how much attention the phenomenon attracts in the media and popular culture.⁸

The Puzzle of Unwed Motherhood in Japan

In Western countries unwed mothers and their children came into the spotlight only once they constituted a significant proportion of single-parent households. Their grip on public attention is explained by fear that growing up in an alternative family leads to negative outcomes for children that include lower educational attainment, teenage pregnancy, and behavior and physical and mental health problems.⁹ In Japan, where only one in about fifty children was born outside marital union in 2006,¹⁰ extramarital fertility—however evaluated—simply does not qualify as a significant social problem. Figure 1.1 shows how exceptional the cumulative decisions of Japanese women are compared to their Western counterparts when it comes to out-of-wedlock childbearing.

What is it that gives Japanese single unwed mothers such a grip on the public imagination in spite of their uncommonness?¹¹ This book will show how unwed motherhood challenges the basic norms associated with childbearing and childrearing, leaving few people indifferent.

Given the lively public interest in unwed mothers and the fact that low illegitimacy rates suggest a distinctive pattern of family formation, the dearth of scholarly interest seems puzzling. Although many scholars have mentioned the rarity of out-of-wedlock childbearing and suggested possible explanations,¹² few have made Japanese unwed mothers the object of their study.¹³ Proposed explanations include economic difficulties, legal discrimination, and the easy availability of abortion. I will discuss these in Chapters 2 to 4. In recent years a number of studies on Japanese single mothers were completed in both English and Japanese. Most of them are, however, predominantly interested in the experiences of divorcées and concentrate on the consequences, rather than the causes, of single motherhood.¹⁴ A major reason for the neglect of unwed mothers is probably that illegitimacy trends have for a long time been overshadowed by divorce trends. While creeping up slowly from 1963 until the 1990s, the divorce rate in Japan was still lower than in most Western industrialized countries. This made it possible for researchers to assume that low divorce rates and low illegitimacy rates had similar roots in a labor market environment unfavorable to single mothers, low welfare provision, and generally conservative family attitudes. An investigation of more recent survey data, however, reveals significant liberalization of most family-related trends including divorce. Marriages happen later, the association of sex and marriage has sunk into oblivion, the fertility rate is falling, families are getting smaller, and the numbers of cohabiting couples and single-person households are on the rise. If we look at the divorce rate, it is immediately obvious that Japan over the past half century has broadly followed trends of, and has now caught up with, Western industrialized countries (see Figure 1.2).¹⁵

FIGURE 1.1. Illegitimate children per 1,000 children

SOURCE: Adapted from data provided by Professor David Coleman, Oxford. All the figures are from Eurostat, Council of Europe, U.S. Census Bureau, and Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare (various years).

One would expect women who consider carrying a premarital pregnancy to term to be under similar economic, social, and cultural pressures as would-be divorced mothers. Indeed, in most Western industrialized countries their numbers are comparable. For example, in the UK in 2006,727,100 (45 percent) of all single-mother households were headed by unwed mothers and 508,970 (32 percent) by divorced mothers.¹⁶ In 2005, out of all U.S. single-mother households, 3,762,000 (42 percent) were headed by divorced mothers and 3,739,000 (42 percent) by never-married mothers.¹⁷ In Japan, however, divorced mothers are much more numerous than never-married ones. In 2006,1,209,000 (79.7 percent) of all single-mother households were headed by divorced mothers compared to 102,000 (6.7 percent) headed by unwed mothers.¹⁸ These figures imply that there must be important differences in the decision-making process of potential divorcées and unwed mothers and that explanations lumping together divorce and illegitimacy trends are at the very least outdated. At the same time, the public fascination with unwed motherhood suggests that the choice of having children out of wedlock touches upon key social norms and values.

FIGURE 1.2. Crude divorce rate

SOURCES: Data from Eurostat, U.S. Census Bureau, and Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare (various years).

This book will provide an account of what it is to be an unwed mother in contemporary Japan and how women end up in this situation. This will tell us a great deal about the choices open to Japanese women and illuminate the institutional, social, legal, economic, and normative structures that make Japanese women cling to marriage so resolutely. As marriage age and the divorce rate are rising and fertility is plunging, studies documenting problems with as well as widespread skepticism about contemporary Japanese marriage proliferate.Yet in Japan the association of marriage and fertility has remained strong. At a time when other industrialized countries are searching for ways to encourage childbearing within marriage, Japan allows us to probe mechanisms that keep marriage and childbearing closely associated. It also throws the problems that this association can generate into particularly sharp relief.

Analyzing what women have seen as the most difficult obstacles facing unwed mothers is one of the best ways to tell what is believed to be essential for “normal” mothering, and hence opens a new perspective on the experiences of Japanese mothers and their children.

The Japanese case is also relevant against the background of the emerging positive association between nonmarital and overall fertility across industrialized countries in recent years.¹⁹ Understanding considerations that underlie childbearing decisions of Japanese unmarried women who find themselves pregnant may throw light on why Japan has been doing so well in competing for the title of the least fertile country in the world.

What Affects Marriage and Reproductive Decisions?

Although no research has been done specifically to investigate Japan’s very low illegitimacy rate over the past few decades, scholars have developed several theories of the changing patterns of family formation that could be applicable to Japan.The leading explanations cite women’s greater economic power, the increasing generosity of welfare, changing social attitudes, and social contagion.

Theories that see economic factors as the heart of the matter apply market logic to family research. This approach is most strongly associated with the name of Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize–winning economist.²⁰ According to Becker, marital unions are most attractive when spouses specialize: typically the wife in homemaking and the husband in labor market work. Growing labor market participation of women decreases specialization and thus, following Becker’s logic, the benefits of marriage. Hence, more women are encouraged to forego marriage.

Another line of theorizing, often called the welfare state hypothesis, suggests that the rise of extramarital fertility is the direct result of the growing state support for single mothers.²¹

Japanese women are still much more disadvantaged in the labor market than their Western counterparts. When it comes to welfare support for single mothers in OECD countries, Japan is firmly situated among the lessgenerous countries. As Chapter 3 will amply document, a Japanese single mother is rarely able to secure an income that would rival that of an average male earner; a Japanese woman would need...