Introduction

This book presents young women’s stories about becoming adults in urban Japan. We will see how they experience and make sense of this process of growing up through to their late 20s. How do young people make transitions to adulthood in Japan? How do they conceive of adulthood? How are their pathways to adulthood shaped by individual decisions and actions on one hand, and by structural conditions on the other? How are their trajectories to, and understanding of, adulthood guided by urban working-class status, and for some, ethnic minority status? These are the questions that underpin this book. Drawing on a unique set of longitudinal data collected over the course of

12 years, I trace the life experiences of a group of working-classwomen from the late 1980s and through the start of the twenty-first century when the Japanese economy and society underwent profound changes. In 1989 they were in their last year of high school as 17-18 year olds in Kobe-city in the greater Hanshin conurbation in the western part of Japan. In early 2001 the women were approaching 30 years of age and still living in the region. The book uncovers a hitherto largely unstudied aspect of Japanese society – the processes through which individuals make their transition to adulthood. In focusing on Japan, one of the very few non-Western post-industrial democratic societies, the book provides an important contrast with the extensive work on transitions to adulthood undertaken in the West (e.g. Settersten et al. 2005; Arnett 2004; Mortimer and Larson 2002). In the following chapters I present extensive biographies based on vivid

narratives of individual young adults; and examine how they experienced and made sense of employment, unemployment, relationships, families, marriages and divorce, in charting their individual trajectories to adulthood. After graduating from high school, some quit first jobs, experienced periods of unemployment, and found temporary work or other permanent full-time jobs. Many developed new relationships or interests outside work. Some married, left their parents’ homes and bore children. Some underwent a bitter divorce, returned to their parents’ home, and resumed another working life. In this process the young people developed more extensive human relationships, formed views of how the society works, came to see themselves as adults, and crafted their identities in relation to class, gender and ethnicity.