ABSTRACT
According to the National Fertility Surveys of single women in Japan, “I have not met the right person” is the most frequent explanation provided by respondents for their single status.2 Though this may come across as women being choosy, I observed that many of my single interviewees were not currently dating and/or had rather short romantic histories, and therefore suspected that they may simply not have had much opportunity to date (as opposed to being picky about potential partners). My analysis of interviewees’ romantic and work histories indeed indicates that opportunities to date were limited, and that this was due largely to structural barriers imposed by work. Additionally, men that interviewees met or formed romantic relationships with were often problematic. Most of the structural barriers observed in my study were shared across the two cohorts, but some were more pronounced among one cohort than the other. Problems regarding men, on the other hand, sharply contrasted between the
two. These ndings again afrm the importance of cohort effects, as outlined by life course theory. In this chapter, I rst show how sparse my interviewees’ romantic histories were, and present my data and analysis on how and why romantic encounters were structurally limited for the two cohorts of women. Next, through interviewees’ accounts, I illustrate the problematic nature of the men of each cohort. In these ndings, we will see how deeply gender – traditional gender ideology in particular – is entrenched in social structure and culture, and how other forms of power and social inequality are relevant as well. These discoveries have led me to contend that increased singlehood is a gendered phenomenon, and that its fundamental causes are structural and cultural and not the outcome of women’s active, strategic, free choices to remain single.
