ABSTRACT
The stereotypical image of a family eating together around the dinner table first took shape during the early industrial phase in Meiji Japan when the dining table – a new import from the West – began to be seen as a necessity for every house. The new custom of family members dining together allowed parent-child relations to be strengthened and intergenerational connections to be forged. Over the past three decades, however, this image of the cohesive Japanese family has been slowly slipping away, with the number of single occupant households increasing from 7.1 million in 1980 to 14.4 million in 2005 and expected to reach 18.2 million in 2030. 1 While this shift partly reflects the trend towards delayed marriage (see Dales, this volume), the trend is more dramatic for elderly households; the number of elderly-only single households more than quadrupled, from 881,000 in 1980 to 3.87 million in 2005. It is also notable that three times as many of these single-person households comprised women as men in 2005. Among elderly-couple households, the increase over this period was greater, at more than four times, from 1.03 million to 4.49 million. 2 The trend towards family diversification and instability is underscored by a range of indices such as the falling birth rate, the rising divorce rate and increased rates of non-marriage, as well as the pluralisation of lifestyles (Fujita, 2009). These indices, together with rising life expectancy and the trend towards single-generation elderly households, have led to various concerns. On the one hand, there are growing concerns about diminishing family support and the shortage of care workers required for the frail elderly, but on the other hand, there are also concerns with the ikigai (purpose of life) of elderly persons, most of whom are expected to remain relatively healthy into their sixties and beyond (Thang, 2011; see also Denman and Stickland, this volume). These concerns have facilitated interest in later-life migration in Japan over the last two decades.
