Social Science Japan Journal Advance Access published online on May 5, 2009
Social Science Japan Journal, doi:10.1093/ssjj/jyp009
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Negotiating What's ‘Natural’: Persistent Domestic Gender Role Inequality in Japan
Scott NORTH is Professor in the Graduate School of Human Sciences, Osaka University. Recent publications include ‘Hataraku: Bungy
o Tegakari ni’ (Gendered Work through Theories of the Division of Labor), in It Kimio and Muta Kazue, eds., Jend
de Manabu Shakaigaku [Shinpan] (Studying Sociology through Gender [New Edition]) (Sekai Shissha 2006) and ‘Karshi Activism and Recent Trends in Japanese Civil Society: Creating Credible Knowledge and Culture’, in Patricia G. Steinhoff, ed., Going to Court to Change Japan: Social Movements and the Law (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming). He can be reached at Osaka University, Graduate School of Human Sciences, Suita-shi, Yamadaoka 1-2, 565-0871 Japan, or by e-mail at north{at}hus.osaka-u.ac.jp
The burden of family work in Japan falls disproportionately on wives, even those who work full time and have relatively high incomes. Japanese household gender culture shows little of the progress toward equality seen in other industrialized nations and this is contributing to delayed family formation and low birth rates. This study of dual-income Japanese families with young children found a degree of increased mutuality in family work being negotiated. Nevertheless, couples’ actions continue to be oriented strongly to symbols of patriarchal prestige, such as husbands’ birth order position and breadwinner status. To the extent that they embraced tradition, respondents’ negotiations were colored by gender displays that preserved the certainties of historically contextualized gender identities and reproduced their associated unequal family work differentials.