Autonomy and responsibility: Women’s life and career choices in urban Japan

ABSTRACT

Based on fieldwork and interviews collected over the past decade, this article examines how young single women in Tokyo are trying to make choices for their careers, navigating between the political economy of labour and reproduction. The article looks at how these women make choices within an ever-changing context where the Japanese moral economy of the postwar coexists with a neoliberal articulation of individual responsibility for life choices. Their experiences reveal the important contradictions between the conservative work regime within companies and the flexible job market they have created. This creates impossible contradictions that place women in both a precarious job market, and when they work in more stable conditions, results in the impossibility of having a family. This article will discuss how, despite these contradictions, young women create meaningful work while attempting to find freedom of choice as they try to define work and life choices not only as a social and moral responsibility, but also as an individual choice. In other words, I seek to show how life choices articulated during the post-growth era are creating new configurations and new challenges within the context of Japan’s ongoing economic and demographic challenges.

KEYWORDS:

• Japan
• single women
• work
• life choices
• neoliberalism
• moral economy

Introduction

Just before the recent global Covid-19 pandemic, Japan was already on the road of a long recovery from one of the biggest crises in its recent history, caused by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami and the following Fukushima Daichi nuclear disaster. It was also, and still is, undergoing important changes rooted in the economic difficulties of the 1990s, which have lasted for nearly three decades. These circumstances have had a major impact, not only on Japanese society and on the economy, but also on the general working environment for men¹ and women and the gendered representations and actions of everyday life. Furthermore, Japan is experiencing major changes in its demography due to the combination of a rapidly aging society and shrinking birth rate, which is also causing a series of serious problems for the renewal of the workforce.

In an attempt to address the shrinking birth rate and workforce, in recent years, there has been much focus in the Japanese press on (former) Prime Minister Abe’s efforts and initiatives to improve working conditions for women. His approach, termed “Womenomics”, aimed at providing both better daycare services and improved work environments for women. These initiatives are important as they aim to solve several crucial problems women currently face in the job market. Through their policies, the Japanese government has been attempting to address, at least in theory, the barriers faced by women in the workplace, and to support women in having both family and a career (Takeda 2018). However, there is still a long way to go in improving the working conditions and corporate practices surrounding women, which are not always in line with government practices (Macnaughtan 2015; Kano 2018). Indeed, even if accessibility to regular positions has increased, it remains that 80% of part-time and other non-regular positions in Japan are filled by women, and, further, the overall number of these flexible jobs has doubled in the last 15 years (Gordon 2017; Takahashi 2015). In other words, there is a large gap between, “Womenomics” and the everyday reality and career aspirations for women (Ho 2020). It is therefore important to understand the experience of work, particularly for unmarried young women, to understand the challenges they face and choices they will make in relation to the workplace. These choices will also affect their perspectives on marriage and children.

Furthermore, changes in the economy have affected life choices and experiences of work² in the context of economic crisis and the increasing flexibility of labor. The neoliberal narrative that emerged in a context of economic difficulties over the last three decades has produced a mixed sense of both freedom and disempowerment, creating an important tension between life expectations and the slow-changing practices of the work regime and gender expectations.

Amidst this backdrop, this article seeks to explain through ethnographic enquiry the experience of work for young, educated, single women in Tokyo. I explore the changed understandings regarding the meaning of work among women and how they deploy different strategies in order to deal with the constraints that often surround their careers and their life choices. I argue that the moral economy of the 1960s, which has legitimized the sexual division of labor in Japan, still prevails within the work regime of many Japanese companies, even as these companies have increasingly created a flexible workforce and support an ideology of self-realization and individual responsibility for life choices. In other words, there are important contradictions between the conservative work regime within companies and the flexible job market they have created. To both escape the old, male-dominated work regime and to respond to the pressure of an increasingly flexible workforce and lack of opportunities in careers tracks, young Japanese women have come to develop a sense of participation in society that is no longer defined solely by static ideas of family structure and a gendered workplace. Instead, these women use the disadvantages imposed on them to make sense of their work and improve their lives with a critical eye on both work and society. Their career paths are thus defined through an ambiguous relation between self-realization and the precarious³ work regime.

Methods

The article is based on fieldwork and interviews⁴ in Tokyo with 18 young women between 2009 and 2019. All of the women interviewed were between 24 and 34 years old and they all had four-year post-secondary degrees. Although they comprise a statistical minority in their age cohort as university graduates, they are still representative of a growing trend where more and more women attend 4-year universities (Osawa 2000). Moreover, they are part of what we could call an urban Tokyoite “middle-class Japan”, even though chances of careers and life paths are strongly mitigated by economic circumstances and the ranking of the school and the university attended (Slater 2010). It should be noted here that since the interviews were held in Tokyo, they are not representative of all middle-class Japan but rather of urban, young, Tokyoite women. Fifteen of them were non-regular employees in SMEs or large companies, and three were regular employees with full-time, permanent positions and with access to promotion and careers within the company. In other words, the majority were not in a career track (sōgōshoku) but rather a “general office track” (ippanshoku).” Often the interviews faded into long conversations about life, work, marriage (while several of them had boyfriends, none were married) and Japanese society. We talked about the workplace, gender expectations, marriage constraints and how they perceive possibilities for their future. We also talked about their parents and their expectations. Their experiences and reflections provide an interesting perspective on how young women feel about and live through Japan’s ongoing recessionary economy, and how political economy articulates with everyday life and materialises into experiences of living in uncertain times. Their critical views of their own condition and of society offer insight into a range of practices and representations that are increasingly important in the context of present-day Tokyo.

Conversations were important because they not only translate into a methodological approach, but also because they emphasize self-awareness of one’s position in society and reveal interviewees’ self-attribution of possibilities of career and success. Indeed, semi-structured interviews were particularly fruitful because through their open conversations I could see their perspectives on their perceived self-limitations due to the level of university they had attended or their expectation towards marriage and family (for example, I heard many times the idea that they could not expect a better job because they were not from a prestigious university). A preconceived idea of what is accessible or not and what could change or not is common as one navigates through Japanese society. Sentences about job opportunities often began with something like this: “because I come from the University X, which is not very prestigious, I couldn’t expect to find ….”, or in other contexts: “because I am a woman I cannot expect to be ….”. Let me also stress here that the young women I interviewed were not married (and had never been married at the time of the interviews), and this also shaped their perspective on choices. In the end, and to paraphrase Lynne Nakano (Ronald and Nakano 2013), it is often the question of the possibilities of choices that is the crux of the matter. It was this question of “possibilities and choices” that they were struggling with when, for instance, they argued about their life choices with their mothers who were (for all 18 of them) stay-at-home mothers (i.e. “professional housewives”), pushing them to get married. Often, discussions were about finding solutions to not live like their parents – that is, with an absent father and career-deprived mother.⁵

Previous research on women and work

Several studies have highlighted different aspects of the relationship between career, identity, life courses and women in Japan. On the subject of careers and career paths, Ogaswara (1998), for example, highlights the power relations in the company and how office ladies (OL) are caught up in structures and dynamics that confine them to acts of micro-resistance in expected roles. In my conversation with women working in big companies there was a distinct preoccupation to not be assimilated to OL even if, like them, they were assigned mundane and insignificant tasks.

A considerable body of research has also focused on career women to show how they attempt to redefine their place at work in negotiations between workplace constraints, gendered expectations and identity (i.e. Ho 2020; Nemoto 2017; Okano 2009; Roberts 2011). Despite some progress, much remains to be done in companies to enable women to make careers. Several research studies have shown how women negotiate their career paths and define work that is worth doing in relation to the constraints of the world of work. These studies reveal the tensions between the will to have a career, expectations about marriage and often the expectations of parents (Nakano 2016). Nemoto (2017) showed the difficulties and different barriers that companies put in place to prevent women from progressing, and the constraints that many women face. Aronsson (2016) and Ho (2020) highlighted how career is intertwined with identity and self-actualization (even though these women have often modeled their career path on conventional male trajectories; see also Rosenberger 2001).

The narratives of my interviewees highlight the effects of the intersection between the flexibilization of the workforce and self-actualization, and show that young women are caught up in a process that insists on the individualization of destinies and the possibility of career, on the one hand, and the resilience of a gendered work regime inherited from the moral economy of the 1960s, on the other hand. While some young women have advanced in their careers by following a “masculine” path, many of them have adopted an approach to their careers based on self-realization. In contrast to women managers (Ho 2020) or those who make a career in the company, most of the interviewees (except for three) have insisted on the possibility of mobility to escape the “traditional” framework, while those who have been caught up in careers in large companies have often claimed that they will use their time in the company after a few years to gain experience for other professional choices according to their desires, including pursuing marriage and child raising—choices that strongly influence professional life paths (Rosenberger 2013).

It is these possibilities, ambiguities and reconfigurations that I wish to explore by seeking to unpack the individual experiences of a sample of young women who have articulated a new definition of work. By focusing on these women’s ideas surrounding their ownership of “work worth doing”, I wish to better understand the relationship between social representations of the economy, the meaning of work, and social participation in Tokyo.

Women, work and flexible labour

Since the mid-1990s, the economic difficulties faced by Japan have transformed the configuration of the labor market and business practices. The ideology of “lifetime employment”, sustained by strong economic growth, has given way to a period of great uncertainty. This reconfiguration of the division of labor, the result of nearly three decades of economic difficulties, is reflected in important changes in the expectations and experiences in everyday life for both men and women.

Several structural changes occurred during the two “lost decades” of the 1990s and 2000s. There was a decline in job recruitment from high schools, two-year colleges, and four-year universities, leading to significantly weakened bonds between companies and the world of education. These links previously allowed young people to gain employment quickly, as schools maintained close relations with a number of businesses, particularly through a system of professional orientation relationships. Through “units of guidance and counseling”, companies often recruited at all levels in schools (Brinton 2011; Kosugi 2008), and teachers helped students find work through these networks. However, in times of economic crises, it is more difficult to maintain the validity of such a system and significant variations between different schools and universities become clearer (Brinton 2011).

In this climate, companies also tended to move more and more towards the use of fixed-term employment contracts, and along with this flexibilization of labour, a shift in the discourses of the business community. This trend was clearly emphasized through the discourse of business leaders, who insist on the importance of self-realization and mobility in the workplace, an idea that was quite new in Japan as we can see in this statement from the Keizai Dōyūkai:

The first step for achieving this goal [responding to the challenge of the market] is to form a corporate structure based on independence and solidarity, in which individuals play major roles. This means developing mobile and flexible organizations; allowing people to freely choose their work; codifying managerial rules; making supervision more transparent; ensuring fair evaluations; and pursuing other similar measures. Unlike the high-growth period in the past decades, which was driven by corporations as organizations, new development in our current era will be driven by individuals who work within companies […] (Keizai Dōyūkai, April 1998).

Indeed, it is since the late 1990s that we have started to see, along with the flexibilization of labour (i.e. diminishing of recruitment in universities and lowering the volume of the regular workforce), the construction of a narrative about choices and self-realization. This period of economic downturn has also seen a significant expansion of part-time and temporary employment among young women. For instance, by the late 2000s temporary employment agencies were comprised of 95% women, and the female part-time workforce increased by 15% between 2000–2010 (Tachibanaki 2010). This is clearly in continuity with the transformation of the work regime that started since the bursting of the bubble economy, in which companies have increasingly required cheap and flexible labor, and women became the first target of hiring freezes for positions with good job security (Roberts 2005).

Even though it is still rooted in Japanese society (at least in ideology), it remains clear that both the model of the sexual division of labor, which was formulated within the high-growth era, and the model of the the devoted professional housewife are more and more contested and no longer resonate in the same way with young women in Japan today. Again, the definition of the role of women in society is the source of many debates, even if in the last two decades or so public opinion has been favorable toward the contribution of women in the labour force. It is becoming increasingly clear that there is a desire to support women’s labour force participation because of the need to live in a more just and equal society, but also to promote productivity and support growth.

This situation further underlines, on the one hand, the ambivalence of the business community vis-à-vis the place of women in companies and, on the other hand, the (prevailing?) moral discourse that insists on the responsibility of women in procreation, child rearing and good family affairs. Paradoxically, the behavior of young adults who refuse to “enter the system” is also criticized in public discourse. As a result, young people are expected to forge their own pathways to financial and existential freedom, despite the numerous institutional constraints they face.

These moral denunciations, therefore, correspond poorly to the reality of young adults who have to adapt to a labor market which has become considerably more uncertain, but which still functions, at least in discourse, on the model of “Japan, Inc”, despite the fact that the number of part-time workers has risen significantly in the last 20 years (Mirza and Bernier 2019). Women are strongly represented in this demographic, and female part-time workers increased from 4.9 million in 1985 to 12.8 million in 2012 (Gordon 2017). These numbers no longer reflect the old division of labor where married women primarily had part-time jobs, but rather it signifies an increasing and systematic flexibilization of the workforce. This is also highlighted by surveys carried out by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications which show that the proportion of irregular employees increased from 20% in 1990 to 37.4% in 2014 (Takahashi 2015).

The changes in the labor market and employment conditions also reflect the need for families to have a second income, the increasing number of single-mother families (due to rising divorces) and, of course, the increasing number of working women in various types of non-regular employment. This phenomenon also indicates a desire on the part of young, educated, middle-class women to obtain more independence, make sense of their life and develop a career – even if the working conditions for women are still very difficult in Japanese companies, especially the most consevatives ones, and considering that women mostly work part-time or temporary jobs (Mirza 2016).

So, if women participate more than before in businesses with job security, the role that they can play in business still remains a field of struggle (Nemoto 2017). In fact, the issue around women’s participation in the workforce is also changing in Japan because of the current demographic crisis. This has added a political dimension to the issue of gender equality in business, and studies that have been published by the Abe government on this subject reveal that better working conditions for women in businesses encourage an increase in the birth rate. However, while women seem to have more and more access to regular jobs (and part-time jobs), the birth rate does not seem to be improving. On the contrary, the birth rate continues to drop. In addition, young adults are getting married less and less (Brinton 2011; Aronsson 2016), which is an important factor in the low birth rate when considering that only 1.5% of children are born out of wedlock (Hertog 2009).

In this context, we must note an increase in the hiring of young women in regular positions in large companies since 2016. Is this the result of the political speech of Prime Minister Abe, who expressed the wish that the proportion of women increase in both senior management positions and in the labor market in general? Indeed, in 2012, Abe proposed to increase the percentage of female executives in large companies from 9% to 30%. He later lowered his expectations to 18% in 2017. Abe also wanted to see an increase in the labor market participation of women between the ages of 25 and 40, which has happened. This is seen in the way that the trough of the famous “M curve” – the notable drop in employment for women aged 25–40, which had been characteristic of women’s labor market participation in postwar Japan – has eased sharply. Since the bottom of the curve has largely disappeared, we can no longer speak of an M curve for all practical purposes.⁶ Among Abe’s other wishes, there was an increase of 200,000 childcare spaces to facilitate the integration of married women with children into the labor market and thus to facilitate work-family balance.

There are, of course, important discrepancies between the condition of the work regime for women, the discourse on self-aspiration, and the possibilities of choices women are trying to make. The availability of more choices and the fact that women are more skilled and educated (Osawa 2000) than before does not mean that their working conditions are drastically improving or that the options increasingly available to them are more interesting. Rather, working conditions for women remain very difficult, despite recent attention to Japan’s labor shortage and the hiring of more women. Indeed, we should keep in mind that in the recent context, career tracks are still much less accessible to women. It remains to be seen if the labor shortage announced in the press will resolve that problem. Indeed, the claim that increased participation of women in the economy will help productivity and boost the GDP ignores the problems related to working conditions and the constrained possibilities of careers for young women in many companies.

Finally, in recent years, contrasting narratives between the moral economy of the high growth era, the flexibilization of labor, and the individualization of destinies have emerged. The moral economy (Thompson 1963) here is a set of ideas and practices that legitimatize a given historical configuration and support a set of incorporate values articulating labour, family and education towards economic growth (Bernier 1995). In other words, the moral economy of postwar Japan is the result of a long series of struggles around economic development and labour that emerged from a series of historical conditions, ideologies, events, and struggles (postwar occupation, labor conflicts, political ideologies, etc.) (Bernier 1995; Gordon 2015). The moral dimension prescribes a certain social order, a sexual division of labour and the importance of work.

The moral configuration of economic life in Japan was crystalized though lifetime employment, a sexual division of labor with men serving the nation through working long hours in industry and big companies, while women were relegated to their households, and where the company-centered society (kigyō shakai) was at the service of the nation (Gordon 2015; Garon 1997; Vogel 2020 [2020 [1963]). Even if the tacit contract between labour and employer has been fading in the wake of the economic difficulties of the last three decades, the practices and a labour regime organized around men within companies are still very much present. Despite the flexibilization of labour and contracted work, Japanese companies are still very much trapped within the modus operandi of the high-growth era which contrasts with the aspirations of many young men and women. It is within the articulation of these contradictions that young women are trying to make sense of their lives and careers in a work environment that, while including them more, primarily includes them on a contractual basis, and where companies behave according to old practices.

Young women’s perspectives on work and life

A job worth doing

The challenges that young women face in the labor market are perceived and negotiated differently depending on the value they place on their careers, their education level and their social class. In the context of my research, the interviewees were young women who were generally middle class and had a four-year university degree. During interviews and discussions, the notion of pursuing “work worth doing” (yarigai no aru shigoto) was clearly articulated when we were talking about the meaning of work. That is, the constraints they faced in the job market led them to form an understanding of the meaning of work that incorporates ideas of personal achievement, participation in society, and acquiring a form of autonomy. This conception allowed them to create flexibility for themselves in relation to the needs and constraints of the workplace.

Our conversations revealed that the constraints related to job mobility are sometimes perceived (sometimes wrongly) as a choice, or, should I say, the possibility of choosing in a work regime that does not offer much choice. In these cases, women contemplated the quality of work they chose, often citing “work worth doing” as their ideal. Certainly, this term reflects the view that one’s work is evaluated based on personal considerations, rather than merely identifying with the company or being a passive victim of the flexible job market. Thus, both despite and because of the constraints they face, many young women were building careers and searching for jobs that allowed them to flourish and brought them personal satisfaction.

Young women make choices that are based, in part, on a desire for a return on their “university investment” – not monetarily, but in terms of energy and time. These decisions are also based on avoiding (not necessarily passively) and challenging “traditional” structures of the work regime. Specifically, occupational choices are expressed through a desire for self-realization, and navigating though flexible work options can be a means to improve one’s labour conditions and avoid the dominant social expectations defined both within and outside of the workplace. Women I interviewed were working in companies of various sizes, but very few worked in large companies as they were not perceived by my interviewees as a space supporting careers for women. It should be recognized, however, that within large companies there has been an increase in the possibilities of positions women can occupy within the company.

In our discussions, some women also talked about actively distancing themselves from large companies, which they felt offered permanent employment for men and unreliable positions for women. Indeed, our conversations revealed that large firms are not always seen as a prime target for building their careers. Beyond the fact that they are difficult to access for women, they were also seen as impersonal spaces, which provide scarce opportunity for job advancement. Thus, occupational choices were made on the basis of professional and personal aspirations, as well as (both perceptions and realities of) institutional constraints. Consequently, some women chose to work in institutions or employment tracks that were not the “traditional” regular employment track in large companies.

Importantly, I am not trying to say that women find flexible work particularly advantageous; rather, for some of the women I interviewed, such flexibility was woven throughout their narratives as a career strategy to avoid the “traditional” work regime with a keen awareness of the limited possibilities for women to access good working conditions, a career and promotions.

In choosing a job considered interesting, interviewees tended to focus on the quality of personal relationships and opportunities for personal expression in the workplace rather than job stability. As the 29 year-old Sakura-san (she was a full time employee as a systems engineer in a tech company) related in a conversation, there is no use in staying in a job where you are treated poorly and, if you have a choice, which is not always the case, it would be interesting to change jobs. Sakura-san’s posture vis-a-vis work is an expression of what the majority of young women I met were thinking and denotes a transformation in the way they conceive of their jobs – particularly with respect to the order of priorities. This sentiment is one dimension of the idea that a career is partly a project of the self (Moore 2011) rather than being solely a service to society. This new pursuit sharply contrasts with the moral economy of the previous generation, as Tomiko-San, a 25-year-old woman working part-time for an NGO noted: “Nowadays, many people believe they are working for themselves, while in the previous generation, I think that the individual existed for the business.”

Tales of difficulties encountered within large firms were commonplace in our conversations, demonstrating the desire these women had to express themselves through their work, while also being recognized as qualified and competent. Yukari-San, a 27-year-old employee of a large company, explained:

“It’s very difficult to assert yourself in business as a woman. Although things are going well with the company I work for, I sometimes encounter problems with clients. For example, I had just been appointed to a management position and had decided that we would no longer deal with a consulting firm that my predecessor used. One day, the consultant from that firm called wanting an explanation, which I gave him. However, he refused to believe me and asked to speak with the manager, which I explained was me. He called back the next day and spoke with a [male] colleague, stating that he would not discuss the matter with a woman. My colleague supported me by telling him that there was nothing he could do since I was in charge of the decision-making. I found the client’s behaviour extremely insulting.”

This story reveals how, even for women in management positions, daily life in the workplace can be difficult as they must sometimes face the gendered attitudes and expectations of men.

The pursuit of self-realization and the ability to express themselves at work was often seen as limited by the barriers they faced in the workplace. For example, they felt that they were seldom given managerial responsibilities, and that their views were rarely considered. This lack of professional recognition and the allocation of mundane tasks also contributed to these women’s feelings of conflict and dissatisfaction within the workplace. While many large companies are implementing new policies to address these inequalities, there remains much room for improvement (Nemoto 2017).

Between autonomy and participation in society

The desire for recognition was often linked to discussions about wages, which were seen by most of my interview participants as a tool for self-realization rather than a source of prestige. While it has generally been the wives of salarymen who manage family finances and allocate allowances to their husbands, the idea of financial independence for women is actually relatively new in Japan. That is, their responsibility for family budgeting represents limited financial power that can disappear in the case of a divorce or overruling by the husband. As such, the opportunity for financial independence was an important factor in the selection of work because it allowed these women to become not merely money-managing wives, but also independent people with personal financial capital (as currently about one out of four marriages ends in divorce). In the same perspective, Nakano (2016) has shown the complex tensions and entanglements between the will to be independent financially, the desire to have a career, and the desire for marriage.

Thus, several important points emerged as guiding the discourse and practices of these young, working women – namely, financial autonomy, being able to use their skills, and having these skills recognized. These ideas often emerged when women defined a successful life and the meaning they placed on work. For instance, Akane-San, a 28-year-old part-time employee in an NGO explained:

“For me, [a successful life] is having a job you love and making a living from your work. To gain prestige in the workplace and to love it enough to want to do it for your entire life are more important than earning a high salary. It is only through these achievements that one can speak of success. Work - that’s life. Of course, I am working to earn money, but even if I became a millionaire, I would continue working, because it is work that gives color to my life. Through the work I do, I feel fulfilled, and every day is momentous.”

Similarly, some testimonies supported the notion that one’s work ethic must be articulated with a kind of work that creates meaning for oneself and for society. For instance, when asked what her ideal job would be, Midori-San, a part-time employee in an office, responded:

“[T]he ideal is that my job matches my vocation, and allows me to grow and be challenged, such that I do not lose the will to progress. If I could find a job to match my vocation, even if to others it seemed too difficult, I do not think I would find it hard work. We spend over half of our day working. It would be painful to do so only to make money. So, work can be a means to satisfy our interests to a degree, to gain a sense of accomplishment, and to enjoy life. However, the reality poses challenges and I do not currently feel any sense of satisfaction with my work. Our work is also a responsibility to society”.

The young women I interviewed stressed the importance of making a living and contributing to society (shakai kōken) through their work. The concept of contributing to society through work is not new in Japan, but what is new is that these young women have appropriated this perspective for themselves, whereas before they may have expressed this expectation solely for men or in a family context of domestic labor. Here, it is interesting to note that women’s contribution to society is not confined to the usual commitment to a variety of community organizations but includes their participation in the paid workforce.

While I have already stressed the role that the modus operandi of business plays in the relationship between mobility and women’s participation in the workforce, the issue of mobility is another factor that influences the definition of work among young women. However, it should be understood in terms of young women themselves. Frequently, when discussing the underlying reasons for seeking a new job, dissatisfaction with the “corporate culture” was often mentioned. Maiko-san, a 30-year-old part-time employee with an insurance company, explained why she left her previous job:

“I wanted to leave my old company because the company culture was ancient. Contempt for women there was considered normal. The work itself was fun, but it was not worth the trouble because, in the end, despite my abilities, it was always the men who got the best jobs. […] and I was over-achieving, merely by doing what seemed normal to me. There were no employees or supervisors worth respecting. The inefficient organization of work necessitated a lot of overtime; in the worst case, I worked until 11PM straight. There was no indication that things were going to improve, so I told myself that I had no future with that company”.

Here, Maiko-san describes sentiments shared by the majority of the women I interviewed. They openly denounced the working conditions they faced and revealed how young women are making efforts to change jobs when these conditions are imposed on them. Indeed, these women felt that they were not valued as much as they should be in the workplace, and they refused to suffer through the injustices they faced there. Maiko-san explained that many young women are now in a position to challenge these conditions through job changes. It also reflects one of the most important and current problems in Japanese companies about the work regime. That is, the long hours that were already problematic for men in the past and that are even more problematic for women and families in the present. Companies are very slow to adapt to women’s needs for managing a career and raising children in response to the expectations placed on women in business.⁷

Several other women interviewed explained that the backwardness of their company caused them to seek other employment. This highlights how their choices to change employers are partly in response to a lack of recognition of women’s skills and their poor chances of promotion. Thus, if women participate more in the workforce and in some companies with more job security (even if this is a minority), the role they can play in the company still remains a site of contention.

This situation highlights, on the one hand, the ambivalence of the business community vis-à-vis the place of women in companies and, on the other hand, the moral discourse still very present which insists on the primary responsibility of women in procreation, the education of children and the good conduct of family affairs. It is particularly in light of these contradictions between the workplace and family expectations that we must understand the decline in marriages in Japan (Brinton and Eunsil 2019).

Indeed, many observers have shown that a growing number of young women are delaying marriage and stay longer in the labor market. This phenomenon is born from the wish of young, educated (university graduate), middle-class women to gain more independence and develop a career even if, as we have just discussed, working conditions for women are still very difficult in Japanese companies (especially many of the larger ones) and women are mostly in part-time or temporary jobs.

Against this backdrop of young women’s desires to work and the resilient corporate culture that places particular constraints on women, it is important to note that the number of women in regular employment has continued to rise in recent years, reaching 40.3% of working women in August 2020 (compared to 64.9% of working men) (Mynavi Career Research Lab 2020). While the rhetoric of Abe’s Womenomics may have played a role in encouraging women’s participation in the labor market, the lack of concrete policies in creating new employment conditions for women points to other factors. Indeed, the main factor may be the shortage of newly qualified young men, with the number of men in employment (regular and non-regular) aged 15–34 declining by over 2.7 million in the past two decades, from 10.92 million in 2000 to 8.21 million in 2020 (Statistics Bureau of Japan 2021). Indeed, large companies are still looking for the “classic” employee, that is, young men coming out of universities (Bernier and Mirza 2010).

Young women I interviewed entering the job market today are certainly aware of the career-limiting problems they will encounter due to corporate expectations in most companies. The list is long: lack of promotion, wage disparities, ancillary work, no maternity leave option or childcare facilities, underrepresentation of women in several economic sectors, etc. They are also aware of the commitments and responsibilities that they will likely be expected to take on if they marry – and, not to mention, have children. Many women sidestep this dilemma by avoiding the bonds of matrimony altogether and accepting (since there appears to be no other choice) job instability and the difficult conditions of the job market that paradoxically offer them a wider gamut of possibilities (in their view) and, above all, greater independence.⁸ The three women I interviewed who were working in permanent positions within companies were reluctant to even mention they had a boyfriend in order to avoid negative expectations from their bosses and to avoid being relegated to less important tasks because of the idea that they would eventually get married. One of these three was also developing strategies to assist at meetings that she was not invited to by offering to serve tea and then staying in the room. She felt undervalued and unappreciated, and so she was trying to be proactive in the office. However, she eventually decided that she wouldn’t stay at her company. Her comments highlighted the impossible dilemmas: “If I stay I will work like my father and have no private life. If I quit working, I will be like my mother and be a stay-at-home wife. Why isn’t there an alternative for women?”

In my interviews, I have been struck by how, for the most part, women seem to regard a wife’s obligations as being inevitable and imperative. Throughout conversations and interviews it was quite clear that marriage, and representations of its inherent obligations, especially the unchangeable nature of its constraints and obligations, push many young women to choose some form of freedom and redefine their relationships before marriage, since they perceived that there wasn’t any margin for negotiation or change once married (Nakano 2011; Mirza 2010).

Indeed, the satisfaction women derive from self-actualization in the context of their love relationships is now based even more than before on how they choose to define a “successful life,” rather than on fulfilling an obligation to play a predetermined role in society. Furthermore, employment is not just a space for socialization or the waiting room for a successful marriage. Marriage remains for many women a complicated moment that is seen as a refuge or as an obstacle. Interviewees and comments show that while many young women seem to be avoiding marriage, this does not mean that they do not want to marry eventually or that being part of a couple is an unappealing prospect to them. Through their various demands, contradictions and difficulties, what these young women are asking for is a chance to make their own decisions and redefine relationships with work and with their partner. More broadly, their redefinition of work is constructed on an ongoing basis around contradictions between their desire for independence and the possibility of building a career on the one hand, and the expectations of their partners, families, companies and the work regime on the other.

Certainly, despite some signs of openness in some progressive companies, the majority of businesses do not seem to be changing their practices to create a structure adapted to the needs of their young female employees. As in the past, corporate structures are still far less accommodating to women today than they are to men. Many companies continue to assign less important tasks to women or ask them to perform ancillary work such as serving tea, even when they are on the sōgoshoku (career) track, not to mention blocking promotions or preventing participation in prestigious projects. Corporate practices that push women onto side tracks, into part-time positions, or which push them outside the company for getting married and having children, clearly impact young women’s conceptions of marriage. That said, the shifts in the conception of women’s work are not entirely attributable to inflexible work regimes. After all, managerial ideology and companies’ positions regarding women’s work are not new (Aronsson 2016; Ho 2020). Although the limits of personal horizons are being pushed by female labor force participation, there was a clear anxiety in the discourse of the women I interviewed regarding their positioning vis-à–vis societal change (or, more often than not, the lack thereof). These concerns were expressed when I asked them about raising children, for example. Their responses involved economic issues, difficulties in the current socio-economic climate and institutional organization, and problems related to their obligations for the education of children and the lack of infrastructure to help them. In considering the question of work and marriage among young women, it is important to note that they do not remain “on the market” only for economic reasons, but also in relation to how they view their careers, their relationship to the family, marriage and their contributions to society (see also Rosenberger2013).

Conclusion

The moral economy of the postwar has been built on a deep and resilient articulation between the work regime and the reproductive regime. In that sense, the idea that women are in charge of the education of children and the household is still very present today – not only in the collective imaginary but also in many companies. However, there is also a series of changes that coexist with this division of labor. Women have been more present on the job market, even if the majority of them are working in part time or non-regular jobs. This presence was first motivated by the necessity for couples to have a dual income in troubled economic times, but it was also clearly motived by the will to give meaning to one’s career and values. This increasing presence on the job market is also motivated more recently by the demographic crisis and Abe and his successors’ efforts to tackle the increasing need for workers.

Many young women are now seeking not only economic survival but also meaning and understanding regarding their role in society, with emphasis placed on professional success and a significant contribution to their company and society. Of course, this is not the case for all women and there is a lot of variation, but it has clearly become a very important preoccupation for the young women I interviewed.

Thus, there are important tensions and contradictions between the neoliberal shift insisting on individual destinies and self-realization and the very slow-changing work values. An analogous tension seems to be apparent between marriage, the role of women in the family and the possibilities of a career. In this regard, it is also important to note the ways in which marriage refusal is linked to the lack of career possibilities in Japanese companies (Mirza 2016).

Despite the ongoing constraints of the workplace, and the tendency for business leaders to confine women to an outdated but commonly accepted role, economic conditions and changes in Japanese labor practices have produced a working environment within which women are trying to create for themselves a meaningful sense of participation in society and the workforce. At the same time, the economic difficulties have led to the emergence of new ways of thinking and of being, revealing the emergence of what I call the “flexible life”⁹ in which choices, affects, desires and life paths are re-articulated through everyday life, through various processes of legitimizing the established order, and through broader changes, including those within capitalism.

These changes highlight a gap between everyday life and the structures of social institutions, as well as between the values embodied by young women and the new positions they occupy in the social space. These new ways contrast with the old hegemonic framework that continues to impose the idea that fulfilling traditional marriage and work roles are part of one’s social and national responsibility.

It is quite clear that the effort of Japanese companies to accommodate Abe’s (and his LDP successors’) policies and to respond to the shortage of young male employees in the workforce is not yet adapted to reconcile women’s careers with the resilient postwar moral economy. By freeing themselves from marital constraints, these young women also gain a degree of freedom from the modus operandi of their companies. However, this approach also creates challenges for women as their professional “freedom” often makes the process of finding a husband more difficult, and they must deal with the backlash that comes along with the rejection of dominant social expectations.

As this article has shown through the examples of my interviewees, the old articulation between the sphere of production and reproduction was still very present in companies, despite discourses about the new place of women in the workplace. What is interesting to observe is that this older articulation no longer matches women’s life choices, strategies and values that are articulated instead around notions of self-appreciation, self-realization and freedom – that is, the qualities of the self-governed subject, or what Foucault has called the neoliberal subject. Paradoxically, then, while conversations with young women reveal the importance that they place on these notions of self-realization and freedom, their acceptance of the flexible work opportunities presented to them also acts to reify the same neoliberal discourse that constrains them.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [430–2015–00434].

Notes on contributors

Vincent Mirza

Vincent Mirza has the joint research Chair Lyon-uOttawa on Urban Anthropocene and he is the director of research Center for the future of Cities at University of Ottawa His research in urban anthropology aims to conceptualise the issues and challenges of an anthropology of contemporary worlds by problematizing the themes of the transformation of work, neighbourhoods and daily life, and environmental crisis allows me to reflect on contemporary urban processes and how they recompose and decompose spaces and social relations in an advanced capitalist context - in Japan, East Asia and in large urban agglomerations.

Notes

¹ Of course, important issues and debates are taking place about men and flexible work and marriage (Cook 2014). I will not discuss them here.

² Work in this article refers mainly to paid employment. It is important to note that other forms of work often performed predominantly by women – affective labour, domestic labour, voluntary work – are often unpaid.

³ Following Ho (2020, 6), I use “precarious” in Bourdieu’s sense rather than in Lazzarato’s sense of “the precariat” that is used sometimes in the literature (e.g. Allison 2014). In other words, I refer here to the experience of work and precarity, rather than referring to the systematisation and emerging class of part-time and temp workers who are sometimes called “the precariat.”

⁴ Fieldwork in Japan, interviews and conversations were part of one SSHRC research grant (410–2010–1199) from 2009 to 2013 and one SSHRC research development grant (430–2015–00434) from 2015 to 2019.

⁵ These dilemmas are nicely related in Ronald and Nakano (2013) and Nakano and Wagatsuma (2004).

⁶ It remains to be see what will happen in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, as the pandemic will likely reconfigure labour dynamics in Japan, as elsewhere.

⁷ For a longer discussion on promotions see Roberts (2019); see also Kimoto (2006) about low-valued jobs attributed to women within the company.

⁸ I discuss these questions more extensively in Mirza (2016); see also Nakano (2011).

⁹ Which refers to Bauman’s Liquid Life (2005), Guattari’s discussion on subjectivity (1984) and Lazzarto’s Capital Labour to Capital Life (2004)