> On Fri, 30 Dec, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > "Demographic Trends and Their Implications for Japan's Future," 7
> > March 1997, <http://www.mofa.go.jp/j_info/japan/socsec/ogawa.html>
> >
> > A very interesting story.
>
> This whole article is fascinating and enjoyable. Thanks for
> posting the link.
>
> > I hope that Japanese women will continue to stick to the birth
> strike
>
> The paragraph after the section you cite makes it sound like it
> isn't so much a birth strike as a strike against having sex period:
>
> <quote>
>
> And I am a bit worried about Japanese women because arranged
> marriages
> are gone; the marriage market is free, but according to my data in
> Japan 45% of single girls are not dating. I mean this figure
> has been
> stable since the beginning of the 1990s.
>
> <unquote>
>
> That's pretty stunning. Sounds like a job for the internet :o)
>
> Michael
Exodus from not only (productive, unproductive, and reproductive) labor but also from the regime of (hetero)sexuality! Foucault would have approved. :->
This phenomenon of non-dating singles in Japan is also a result of the paradox of Japan being very modern and very traditional at the same time. It is modern, so there is little social pressure on men and women to get married and have children. It is traditional, so leisure time is organized homosocially as it has been -- no pressure on them to date or else to think of themselves as sexual losers as dateless men and women in America would. Observe young people in urban areas in Japan (few Japanese live outside urban areas -- only the left-behind old folks live in rural areas), and you see numerous groups of young women hanging out and milling about -- very late into the night or till early morning even, Japan being probably the safest country for (even very drunk) women (and men) to walk freely in urban streets in the world -- having fun on their own, happily free from men.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>