New Studies of Modern Japan. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. xxv, 129 pp. US$80.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4985-2996-9.
Aya Ezawa’s book draws upon life history interviews with fifty-nine single mothers and aims to better understand “the class dynamics of family life and … the gender dimensions of social class in contemporary Japan” (107). It focuses on strategies that single mothers take to childrearing and obtaining and retaining jobs that can support their families, attending to how they negotiate their aspirations for their children and work-family conflicts. In her introduction and chapter 1, Ezawa introduces her framing questions, discusses her method, and sets the historical stage for her study. Chapters 2 and 3 examine women born after World War II who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, and what Ezra calls the Bubble generation, who came of age during Japan’s booming economy in the late 1970s and 1980s, before its long recession. Chapter 4 discusses single motherhood, focusing on how single mothers deal with financial and time constraints. Chapter 5 examines the class dimensions of women’s efforts to strike a balance between being good mothers and reliable workers who will be kept on in economic hard times. Ezawa wraps up the book with theoretical conclusions based on the recent experiences of single mothers from varied class and educational backgrounds.
Ezawa conducted her interviews between 1998 and 2000, with follow-up trips in 2004 and 2005. One of the strengths of her book is the empathy and close knowledge she conveys for her research subjects. We learn about how they made decisions ranging from marriage to work, divorce, and balancing work and family obligations. We learn where they cut financial corners, and how they relied on formal and informal arrangements to get by: government benefits, earnings, help from family members, and subsidized housing. The earlier generation approached education, marriage, and single motherhood in an innovative, feminist spirit of being pioneers who were finding new ways to establish and preserve families. In contrast, the Bubble generation was more apt to try to conform to the postwar Japanese family ideal of a breadwinner man married to a stay-at-home housewife. For both groups, women from middle-class families often went on to university and earned four-year degrees, while women from working-class backgrounds were more likely to pursue low-paid irregular jobs after finishing high school. Some high-school graduates pursued vocational training that helped them get and keep decent jobs (for example, as accountants), a strategy that Ezawa notes as an important route for single mothers to escape poverty. Though the composite portrait is clear enough, it was often difficult to track the different mothers’ voices, as Ezawa took the strategy of examining several issues one by one, drawing on several interviews to provide illustrations. Discussing a few exemplary women in depth (as she does in chapter 4) would have made it easier to track her subjects and to feel involved with their lives.
Ezawa zooms in on three women in chapter 4: Tanaka and Yamamoto (both middle class), and Kimura, a working-class woman. Tanaka worked two part-time teaching jobs in order to spend more time with her preschool-age daughter, managing despite being paid less with reliable help from her parents and by economizing on food and other expenditures. Yamamoto took the tack of being a workaholic who depended on her ability to earn a stable and relatively high income. She paid for babysitting services to watch her son, and prioritized giving him educational advantages even though she had little time with him because of work pressures. Kimura had two young children, and worked part-time as a bar hostess until she stopped working altogether. Living in a subsidized apartment helped her save a lot of money, and she relied on the government-provided dependent children’s allowance to stay at home with her children rather than spending long hours working to earn modest wages. Her own parents were unavailable to provide help with her children. Ezawa uses these three women to illustrate how the decisions each made about work, mothering, and childrearing reflect their priorities and convey class values to their children, reproducing class in the process.
For the most part, Ezawa focuses on how single mothers manage their stressful lives at the individual level, only rarely stepping back to consider the remarkable changes transforming Japanese society at the turn of the twenty-first century. Articulating the systemic character of the economic difficulties and organization of the labour market and the pressures they place on young people would have made this study richer. Young people face historically high unemployment rates, intense pressure to take part-time, contract, or temporary jobs, and enormous pressure on those who do get good jobs to work overtime and accommodate company demands so that they can keep those jobs. Such work-related issues have made the postwar Japanese family ideal hard to achieve for the ranks of young people stranded in low-paid informal job tracks. As it has become harder to find marriageable partners, the ideal has given way to hesitation about marriage and childbearing, harsh conflicts between work and family life, very low fertility rates, and increasing numbers of women who feel they must choose between being mothers and having lifelong jobs or careers.
Putting this study into the larger social, economic, and political context might have sharpened the stakes of Ezawa’s argument. As marriages are later, fewer, and more likely to end in divorce, understanding how single mothers cope and the economic straits they face takes on greater urgency. One might have expected her to offer some ideas about policy approaches that could make it easier for single mothers to manage: government support for “good” part-time jobs in the private sector, for example, or increasing the number of public-sector jobs that are suitable for single mothers (for example, with part-time or flexible hours until children enter elementary school, and paid leave to cover doctors’ visits and children’s illnesses), or passing reforms in divorce law to hold fathers more responsible for supporting their ex-wives and children.
Patricia Boling
Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA
pp. 584-586