Marriage as an association of social classes in a low fertility rate society.pdf

8/10/2019 Marriage as an association of social classes in a low fertility rate society.pdf

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FILOLOKI FAKULTET U BEOGRADU

Marriage as an association of social classes in a low

fertility rate society

Sawako Shirahase

Predmet: Savremene studije kulture I

Zadatak 1: Prikaz

Doktorand: Dragana Aneli

Broj dosijea: 13085/D

Datum predaje: 29. XI 2014.


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Nowadays plenty of data show that Japan's society is characterized by low fertility rate

as well as postponement and avoidance of marriage. The purpose of this chapter is to look

into the disturbing trends. The author hopes to find answers to the following questions: who

gets married in Japan and to whom, and in what way are marriages related to class formation?

To accomplish that, the author deals with population shifts first.

The statistics show that, in order to mantain the population at a steady level, Japan's

total fertility rate should be 2.08. Although the Japanese believed that things could not get

worse than in 1989 when the fertility rate fell to 1.57, they suffered a real shock in 2005 when

they found out that the fertility rate stood at 1.32. It is thus more than obvious that an

enormous demographic shift is taking place in Japan today, as well as in many other social

systems. However, the main problem really is not a decline in the overall population, but the

very structure of the population because demography is not just a matter of counting people. It

deals with the question of society members' distribution and quality of their lives, so it is only

logical to look at the household as the basic unit of consumption. The author has found that

the most striking changes in household composition in Japan are an increase in households

with one member only and the number of people who never get married. Be that as it may, a

household based on a married couple still remains the dominant style of households.

Having dealt with these rather general findings, the author then looks at the declining

fertility rate and extreme aging of population in more detail. The constant decline in the

fertility rate leads to a striking increase in the age of the overall population and the imbalance

between generations. However, the growing number of old people is only one aspect of the

aging population problem; the equally important index is the increase in life expectancy.

Increasing life expectancy means that individual members of the elderly population will

continue to be in that population for a longer period of time. That raises the question who and

in what way is going to look after them, which is not only a macro-level problem, but a

micro-level one, affecting individual lives.

So why do the Japanese have more older people than children? The author found two

main underlying factors: the increasing number of unmarried people and a decline in fertility

among those who did get married. From the 1950s onwards both men and women have shown

a striking tendency to marry later in life. Interestingly, until the late 1980s, there were more

unmarried women than men, but the number of men who never got married has started to

climb seriosly since then. Although the number of unmarried men in their forties and fifties is

not yet high, these groups show a tendency to grow fastest.


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In regard to a decline in fertility among married couples, many married couples decide

to have less children, and since the 1990s, this has had a huge impact on the broader

demographic picture. In spite of that, childless couples still remain a very small minority,

even though the total percentage slightly increased from 1977 to 2005. On the other hand,

three-child families have shown a sudden decline in recent years. Interestingly enough, the

reason for married couples having less children is not because they do not want to, but

because they cannot. There are many reasons that prevent couples from having as many

children as they would wish, and one of the most common is the high cost of child-rearing

and education. However, that does not mean that more children are born in financially stable

families, quite the contrary, high-income families show fastest decline in the number of

children.

Let us not forget that reproductiveness in Japan is largely governed by class factors,

which leads us to the question of class match or mismatch between the sexes. The author's

opinion is that the influence of educational achievements on marriage as a class association

has been a significant factor for many decades. With the decline of arranged marriages and

the growing dominance of love marriages, family lineage ceased to be an important factor in

marriage decisions. Despite the apparent dominance of love marriages, there are still great

changes in the Japanese marriage market (Shida et al., 2000). For instance, from 1985 to

2005, low-educated Japanese men in their twenties and thirties showed the highest rate of

increase in non-marriage; the mid-education group also showed a rise, especially from 1985

to 1995; the high-education group, in contrast, showed the smallest rate of increase. As for

women, the change in non-marriage rates is roughly the same no matter the education level,

showing the overall decline in non-marriage.

Changes in non-marriage rate by class origin also show some striking findings. For

instance, the unskilled manual class shows the smallest increase in non-marriage rate; the

skilled manual class exhibited an increased non-marriage rate; the highest non-marriage rate

was detected among women of the professional-managerial class and the skilled manual class.

The reason for the significant increase among aforementioned class of women is that they are

no longer under the social pressure to get married at, say 23 or 24, which has become widely

accepted.

In regard to marriage timing, the clearest trend is the lengthening of the period from

completing education to marriage among men in the low-education group. The mid-education

group of men also showed a slight lengthening of that period, while highly-educated menactually showed a shortening of the period from graduation to marriage from 1995 to 2005. In


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the case of women, all three groups showed a slight decline in graduation-to-marriage period

but, what is even more interesting, the proportion of people staying unmarried increased,

while those who did get married tended to do so more quickly.

The authors opinion that the influence of educational achievements on marriage as a

class association has been a significant factor for many decades was supported by the

statistics. In terms of occupation as well as education, the Japanese tend to marry like. The

highly-educated people tend to meet their future marriage partners in the same higher

education institutions; by contrast, the low-education group is more likely to find their future

spouses in the neighborhood or through parental or sibling connections. One of the reasons for

that is the impact of parental educational credentials and the self-reported standard of living.

The highest self-reported standard of living was among respondents whose parents both had

high levels of education, and the lowest was among those whose parents both had low levels

of education. However, that does not imply that highly educated and wealthy couples have

more children; they have the fewest children and spend the most on bringing up each of them.

In contrast, couples where both partners had low levels of education had the most children

and spent the least on bringing up each of them. It may be therefore confirmed that the

combination of educational levels in a married couple in Japan is indeed an important factor

influencing the education of the next generation and the transmission and perpetuation of

parental class status.

This chapter looked into the reasons for Japans low fertility and postponement and

avoidance of marriage. Although the author himself admits that he has not substantiated more

than just a basic level of analyses, his findings are notably valuable and can be used for a

more comprehensive research.

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Marriage as an association of social classes in a low fertility rate society.pdf