ABSTRACT
Age norms are said to be strong in Japan,1 and marriage has been the normative – socially expected – life path for all.2 In much of Japan’s modern history, women were expected to marry during tekireiki, which literally means appropriate or suitable age/time to marry. Age 22 to 25 was considered to be tekireiki for women, and when women of this age did not have concrete marriage plans, they were pressured to marry (or secure marital partners) by neighbors criticizing them for being unmarried, parents and relatives urging them to have miai (arranged meetings with potential marital partners through gobetweens), etc.3 As Figure 2.1 shows, up until the mid 1980s, most women did indeed marry during, or not too many years after, tekireiki – indicating the strength of this age norm.4 The average age at rst marriage for women, however, rose constantly and signicantly – and was 29.2 in 2012.5 As discussed in the last chapter, since the late 1980s the number of never-married women in their late twenties began to increase, and the never married outnumber the married among women aged 25 to 29 today (See Figure 1.1 in Chapter 1). We must conclude that the traditional marriage age norm is no longer in effect in Japan. When and how did this age norm lose its effect? This chapter presents stories, told to me by women of the boom and recession cohorts in the course of my research, indicating that the norm was strongly internalized among boom cohort women, but that its enforcement began to weaken during the economic
boom. By the time the recession cohort women grew up to be young adults (during the economic recession), the norm was completely obsolete. Has the decline of this marriage age norm had any impact on women’s life paths, and if so, in what ways? It is helpful to apply Emile Durkheim’s concept of anomie in understanding the impact of the breakdown of norms on individuals’ life paths. Anomie is a state of society, caused by rapid social change, in which (traditional) culture is weakened or absent and thus effectively no longer prescribes appropriate behaviors for individuals.6 Though this societal condition could be seen as providing greater personal freedom and liberation from tradition, Durkheim argued that humans need some level of normative guidance to balance selsh urges, and that the absence of constraint provided by norms could have serious consequences for individuals (as well as society as a whole). Imagine if all of us had to drive without maps, directions, GPS, and trafc rules. We would have difculty guring out what paths we should take, how to navigate, how to avoid dangerous roads and accidents, etc. Some (or many) could end up getting completely lost – or inadvertently turn onto wrong paths and never reach the destination they originally planned/wished to reach. The impacts of the absence of social norms on life paths are more abstract and harder to imagine than this simple analogy portrays, but the basic argument is the same. If we are not clearly guided by socially shared norms, some or many of us may end up taking unintended life paths – such as lifetime singlehood. The marriage age norm did not disappear overnight. It was well internalized among the boom cohort yet began to lose its power when boom cohort women were young adults, and was absent by the time the recession cohort reached adulthood. Life course theory informs us that different historical contexts shape
individual life courses differently. Particularly in rapidly changing societies, the life course varies signicantly by cohort membership as the historical context changes during one’s lifetime.7 As will be demonstrated below, the two cohorts’ life stories indicate discernable differences in social and cultural contexts between the economic boom era (when the boom cohort women were young adults) and the economic recession era (when the recession cohort women were young adults). Thus, the impact of the (weakening) marriage age norm was not identical for the two cohorts. This chapter presents the accounts of two cohorts of women – the boom cohort rst and the recession cohort next – which illustrate the process of the breakdown of the marriage age norm and its impacts on young women. As we will see, realities of gender and gender inequality, as well as other forms of social inequality, permeated their life experiences and perceptions.
