ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the ideas of happiness grasped by middle-class housewives of today's Japan. It also focuses on happiness as a socio-cultural idea and on the way people in a specific cultural context conceive happiness. The chapter shows the ideas of happiness for contemporary middle-class housewives still are strongly related to the ideas or pursuit of stability. The quest of happiness for middle-class women is thus embodied in marriage as the idea of following a standardized life plan and forming a "standard family". The chapter suggests that the cultural idea of happiness or the idea of what forms the promise of happiness is closely related to leading an expected and normative lifestyle and life plan. The changing cultural concept of happiness of Japanese housewives seems to have been largely related to the emergence of a new type of "happy housewives" as depicted in popular women's magazines.
