ABSTRACT
On June 18, 2014, Tokyo Assemblywoman Ayaka Shiomura, from a minority party, was making a speech at an Assembly meeting. She was requesting more governmental support for women in the areas of childrearing and infertility when she was interrupted by heckling. Multiple men of the leading conservative Liberal Democratic Party shouted: “You should get married soon!”; “Can’t you bear children?” Loud laughter followed. Assemblywoman Shiomura, a former TV personality and bikini model, was never married and had no children, and was just a few weeks shy of turning 36. Barely collecting herself, she completed the speech with tears and a shaking voice.2 Publicly humiliating women for their single status, as observed in this incident, is hardly uncommon in Japan.3 Shiomura later complained in one interview to the press that her hecklers were “insensitive to women who want to but cannot marry.”4 Indeed, politicians and the general public have been oblivious to the notion that women might in fact be unable to marry. Instead, never-married women have been objects of criticism and ridicule, particularly since the late 1980s when the number of unmarried women began to surge. As in all developed nations, as well as many rapidly developing countries,5 the number of never-married singles has increased dramatically in Japan. As Figure 1.1 shows, for women, the rst signicant rise was observed among those aged 25-29 between 1980 and 1990, when Japan’s economy was booming at an unprecedented rate. In the early 1990s, the Japanese economy entered a severe recession, and still the never-married population continued to grow. The most recent statistics from 2010 show that 60.3, 34.5, 23.1, 17.4, 12.6, and 8.7 percent of women in age groups 25-29, 30-34, 35-39, 40-44, 45-49, and
50-54, respectively, had never been married – record highs for each age group. (Note that the corresponding gures were higher for men: 71.8, 47.3, 35.6, 28.6, 22.5, and 17.8 percent.6) Unlike unmarried people in many Western countries, most of these never-married singles in Japan were not cohabiting with partners.7 Instead, the majority lived with their parents, and some lived on their
own.8 Also, whereas a growing number of unmarried women in the West have children outside wedlock, unwed motherhood is extremely rare in Japan.9 These gures reveal Japan as one of the least-partnered nations in the world. This phenomenon of increased singlehood (mikonka) has received political, social, scholarly, and media attention in Japan largely because of its direct association with Japan’s “population problem (jinko¯ mondai).” Japan’s birth rates declined sharply and have lingered far below replacement level (which is an average of 2.1 children per woman)10 at the same time as the single population grew.11 The total fertility rate12 for 2014 was 1.42 (meaning that the birth rate of 2014 estimated an average of 1.42 children would be born per woman). Simultaneously, as in other nations, average life expectancies increased. Japan’s birth rate has been one of the lowest in the world, whereas its average life expectancy has been one of the longest.13 Together with a low level of acceptance of immigrants,14 Japan has become the most aged country – meaning that the proportion of the population that is elderly is larger than is the case for any other country.15 To illustrate, in 2013, one out of four (25 percent) residents in Japan was aged 65 and above. This rate is projected to increase to one out of three (33.4 percent) by 2035.16 By comparison, in the U.S. the proportion of the population aged 65 and above was about one in eight (13 percent) in 2010, and is projected to grow to be one out of ve (20 percent) by 2030, after which the growth rate of the elderly population should slow down.17
