Unmarried, No Children
Once told to heed the sound of wedding bells, young Japanese are now relishing the single life.
Marko Kumoi enjoys many of the good things in life available to a modern Japanese woman: a rewarding job with a major retailer, foreign holidays, nights on the town in Tokyo’s entertainment districts. At age 31, she lacks just one thing to make her life complete: a husband. In the past that might have worried her. Now, whenever a relative helpfully suggests she get hitched, her mind wanders to acquaintance’s stories of thankless housework and how they look forward to their husbands disappearing on work trips. “Most of my married friends say they have separate rooms and their husbands are always too tired for sex,” she says. “Marriage seems like a contract. I’ve got other things I want to do instead.”
That kind of attitude was a no-no until recently in Japan, where family values were the only values socially acceptable: single women were objects of pity, and unmarried men were assumed to be maladjusted. Now, as women are gaining economic freedom with their entry into the workforce, more and more are deciding that, all things considered, they’d rather be alone. A 1970 government survey found that 93% of Japanese women were married by their early 30s; by 1996, the figure had dropped to 80%. More than half of Tokyo men in their early 30s are unwed. “The family system is starting to collapse,” says Tetsuro Morinaga, an economist at a Tokyo think-tank. It’s the first time the Japanese have been given the right to be free.