Family sociology in Japan: Recent developments and the current state of the field

Abstract

Although family sociology in Japan has a long history, sociological family studies in Japan have undergone major changes since the 1990s. This article recounts the ways in which family sociology in Japan has developed and its current state, with a special focus on the developments in the last three decades. The 1990s marked a turning point in the history of Japanese family sociology in terms of the establishment of new academic societies and a paradigmatic shift in theoretical orientations. The trends in family research articles indicate the continuing importance of quantitative research, with the role of qualitative research on the rise over the last two decades. In reviewing the literature over the last three decades, the author summarizes four major strands of empirical research: (a) care and families, (b) social inequality and families, (c) comparative research, and (d) diversity of families.

Keywords

Japan Society of Family Sociology National Family Research of Japan research methods

Japanese society in the 21st century has been undergoing a serious demographic crisis. The total fertility rate in the last two decades has been hovering around 1.3 to 1.4. Almost 30% of Japan’s population is now over the age of 65, the highest proportion in the world. Natural population decline has been accelerating since the late 2000s, causing concerns among policy makers over its impacts on the labor market and economic growth.

In tandem with this demographic change, Japanese society has also witnessed significant changes in marriages and families (Atoh, 2008). A few examples: marriages are becoming fewer and later, divorce rates have soared markedly, and labor market conditions among youths have become more insecure (Fukuda, 2013). How has Japanese family sociology grappled with these changes?

This article aims to recount the ways in which family sociology in Japan has developed in the last two to three decades. It also describes the current state of the field, paying close attention to recent research trends. Because this article is not intended to be an exhaustive review of recent studies on Japanese families,¹ interested readers should consult the literature in the reference list.

Recent developments in the field of family sociology in Japan

Although sociological family research in Japan has a long history since the pre-war period, its systematic development started in the 1950s under the strong influence of American sociology (Morioka, 1981). Faced with post-war rapid changes in the family, such as the increase in nuclear families, the study of ‘modern families’ rather than of traditional ‘ie’ families² became the dominant research focus for family sociologists (Ishihara, 1992). In the 1960s, influenced by Parsonian structural-functional theory, a ‘nuclear family paradigm’ was established as the dominant research paradigm among Japanese family sociologists (Morioka, 1998).

The foundation of the Japan Society of Family Sociology (JSFS)

Many family sociologists in Japan regard the 1980s as a ‘turning point’ in the development of family sociology (Ikeoka, 2017). It was a turning point in two senses. The first pertains to the organizational changes in family researchers. Beginning from the late 1970s, because of the increasing tendency towards specialization across sociology and related disciplines, many new academic societies were formed. Nihon Kazoku Shakai Gakkai [the Japan Society of Family Sociology; JSFS] was founded in 1991 as a new academic society of Japanese family sociologists, with Kiyomi Morioka as its first president. Although another interdisciplinary academic society called the Kazoku Mondai Kenkyukai [the Council on Family Relations]³ existed, JSFS was established as an academic society that aimed to promote family research in Japan through nationwide collaborations among family sociologists, thereby making it the authoritative academic society for family sociology in Japan.

JSFS attracted the attention of many family researchers, and has enhanced its academic role and status. Its main activities are the publication of its scholarly journal, the sponsorship of annual meetings, and the carrying out of other academic activities. JSFS began publishing its academic journal Kazoku Shakaigaku Kenkyu [Japanese Journal of Family Sociology; JJFS] in 1989. It has been published bi-annually since 2000. Annual meetings have been held at various Japanese universities every year. The 29th annual meeting in 2019 was held at Kobe Gakuin University, where more than 60 papers were presented in 18 program sessions and 232 members participated.⁴

Without doubt, the establishment of JSFS marked a new epoch of family sociology in Japan. By promoting national and international exchanges between family researchers, it not only has greatly increased the circle of family sociologists, but also contributed to training new generations of family researchers.

Changing theoretical trends in Japanese family sociology

The 1980s was also a turning point in terms of theory in Japanese family sociology, as there was a ‘paradigm shift’ (Ochiai, 2013). Objecting to the ‘nuclear family paradigm’,⁵ this period saw the emergence of new theoretical perspectives on the family. With the demise of post-war economic growth, Japanese families began to show a new pattern of change in the 1970s that has continued to this day. To take just a few examples: declining marriage and fertility rates, declining proportions of nuclear families, increasing divorce rates, and increasing labor force participation rates of married women. These changes might have prompted the subsequent theoretical changes in Japanese family sociology.

The new theoretical perspectives which surfaced in the 1980s can be summarized in three broad categories (Ikeoka, 2017). The first was an emphasis on ‘individuals’ rather than the family group as the unit of analysis in family studies. For instance, the introduction of the life course perspective in Japan in the 1980s provided a new theoretical impetus to turn researchers’ attention to diversifying family life courses and to discard the ‘standardized’ model of the family life cycle. The second was a gender and feminist perspective that was gaining popularity in Japanese sociology then (Meguro, 1987). This perspective, influenced by second-wave feminism, brought to light the patriarchal oppression of women in Japanese families and questioned the theoretical view that assumed harmony of interests in the family. The third was a historical approach to the modern family. Researchers influenced by historical studies on the origin of the modern family began to stress the importance of putting the Japanese modern family in historical context (Ochiai, 1989; Yamada, 1994). This critique coming from a historical point of view made family researchers aware that the Japanese ‘nuclear family’ was historically specific and paved the way for subsequent historical research which questioned the prior assumptions on family change in Japan.

The NFRJ and the expansion of quantitative studies

What did the organizational and theoretical changes described above mean for the development of empirical family research since the 1990s? One of the important changes since the 1990s was a collaborative effort by JSFS to improve the research environment of family sociology in Japan. The most significant among these is the launch of the National Family Research of Japan (NFRJ).

The 1990s was a turning point in the history of quantitative studies in Japanese sociology. With the exception of some limited research fields such as social stratification research, the development in quantitative data analysis based on nationwide surveys was limited in Japan. Since the 1990s, however, due to the rapid spread of personal computers, researchers’ interest in analyzing large-scale, national representative datasets soared.

In the early 1990s, there was no nationwide family survey in Japan available to researchers who were not affiliated with a large-scale research project, constituting a major hurdle for the development of quantitative family research. Some of the principal members of JSFS suggested the idea of conducting a survey as an official project of JSFS. Approved as an official research activity by the JSFS Congress of 1993, the National Family Research Committee was launched to implement the project.⁶

Examining prior family and household surveys, the Committee planned a new nationwide family survey to be open for academic use by family researchers. After a few years of struggles, the first NFRJ survey was conducted in early 1999. Planned as repeated cross-sectional surveys to grasp the continuity and changes of Japanese families on a national scale, the NFRJ survey has been conducted four times over a 20-year period (in 1999, 2004, 2009, and 2019).⁷ In the most recent 2019 survey, a new challenge was introduced in which additional qualitative interviews were conducted with selected cases. The NFRJ survey has been widely used by many researchers in and outside of Japan, and research results have been published as many papers and several books edited by its Committee members (Inaba et al., 2016; Tanaka, 2013; Watanabe et al., 2004).

By the turn of the century, the research environment for quantitative studies was undergoing rapid change. This was accelerated by the establishment of the Social Science Japan Data Archive (SSJDA). As the first data archive in Japan, SSJDA began disseminating raw data in 1998. Since around the 2000s, new social surveys expanded the datasets available for quantitative family studies. Representative among these are the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers, the Japanese General Social Surveys (JGSS), and the Japanese Life Course Panel Survey. As discussed in the next section, this change appears to have prompted family sociologists to conduct quantitative studies based on secondary data analysis.

The current status of family sociology in Japan

Research trends gleaned from JJFS articles

What is characteristic of the research trends in Japanese family sociology over the past two decades? To answer this question, a brief review is presented of the articles published in JJFS from 1989 through 2020, focusing on the methodologies and objectives of the articles.⁸ While JJFS is the most prominent academic journal of Japanese family sociology, readers should note that this is not an exhaustive review.⁹

Because the aim of this review is to characterize the research trends of empirical family studies over 30 years, only empirical articles were selected for the analysis. In total, 200 articles were selected. To analyze change over the years, the data were tabulated by dividing the period of analysis into five subperiods: 1989–1995, 1996–2002, 2003–2009, 2010–2016, 2017–2020.¹⁰ Because of fluctuations in total pages across volumes, the number of the articles varies widely across the periods: 25, 39, 61, 37, and 38, respectively.

To analyze trends in research methodologies and objectives, articles were classified into four categories constructed by two binary variables. One variable is ‘quantitative/qualitative’, which concerns the research method adopted in the article. For articles that used mixed methods, the method by which the substantive finding of the article was presented was used. The other variable is ‘general families/problem families’, which concerns the research objective(s) of the study. Articles with data drawn from a sample in which the research subjects were assumed to experience serious family conflicts or problems were classified as articles about ‘problem families’.¹¹ Four categories were formulated using these two variables: Quantitative & General, Quantitative & Problem, Qualitative & General, and Qualitative & Problem.

The results are shown in Table 1. With regard to the ‘quantitative/qualitative’ variable, the proportion of quantitative articles (the two leftmost columns) exceeded 50% over the entire period. Of the quantitative articles, ‘Quantitative & General’ has remained the dominant category, reflecting the steady increase in secondary data analysis. Qualitative articles did not appear in the 1989–1995 period, but started to increase in the 1996–2002 period. The overall share of qualitative articles remained roughly 30%. Looking at changes over time, the share of qualitative articles significantly increased in the 2000s and almost reached 50% in the 2003–2009 period. After the 2010–2016 period, however, the share of qualitative articles appears to have slightly decreased. An additional analysis (results not shown) reveals that the share of articles written by young researchers are almost the same in both quantitative and qualitative articles in the last decade.

Table 1.

Trends in JJFS articles: 1989–2020.

Type of articles	QuantitativeGeneral	QuantitativeProblem	QualitativeGeneral	QualitativeProblem	Total
1989–1995	17 (68)	8 (32)	0 (0)	0 (0)	25 (100)
1996–2002	27 (69)	4 (10)	3 (8)	5 (13)	39 (100)
2003–2009	26 (43)	5 (8)	9 (15)	21 (34)	61 (100)
2010–2016	20 (54)	3 (8)	3 (8)	11 (30)	37 (100)
2017–2020	21 (55)	6 (16)	5 (13)	6 (16)	38 (100)
Total	111 (56)	26 (13)	20 (10)	43 (22)	200 (100)

Row percentages shown in parentheses.

For the ‘general / problem families’ variable, the share of articles on ‘general’ families (first and third columns) remained at around 60–70%, of which the majority were quantitative articles. The articles on ‘problem’ families (second and fourth columns), whose share fluctuated between 20 and 40%, have maintained a significant presence in the last two decades. Of these, articles based on qualitative methods were dominant. During the 2017–2020 period, however, the share of quantitative articles increased in this category.

To summarize, while quantitative research has been dominant, the importance of qualitative research has steadily grown over the last two decades. The fact that the share of young researchers is almost the same in both quantitative and qualitative articles suggests that recent developments are not biased toward a particular research method. Research on ‘problem families’ has remained important in this period, with qualitative research playing a more salient role.

Major research areas in Japanese family sociology

According to Watanabe (2013), the research trends of Japanese family sociology are characterized by theoretical and methodological ‘diffusion’ and diversity. Certainly, the research themes and methodologies of recent literature are too diverse to summarize here. In this section, I cluster the literature into four research fields (Care and families, Social inequality and families, Expansion of comparative research, and Diversity of families), and introduce a limited selection of studies in each.

Care and families

The first research field pertains to care and families. By the term ‘care’ I mean care for the frail and elderly, child care, and care for adults with disabilities. Rapid population aging has led to higher frequencies and prolonged periods of caregiving between family members. The increasing burden of care has brought about high turnover rates among workers, including men, who are responsible for the care of family members. To ease the increasing burden of family caregivers, the Japanese government introduced the public Long-Term Care Insurance System in 2000, which provided a new context for family caregiving. Accordingly, family sociology in Japan has produced much empirical literature on how families manage to care for the frail and elderly.

Iguchi (2017) points out that research on elderly care over the past two decades is characterized by its focus on the social relationships that extend beyond elderly–caregiver dyads, where members such as providers of social services play significant roles in the process of caregiving. Qualitative studies stand out in this field: Kido (2010), based on social constructionist perspectives, describes the practices of home helpers which sustain the family relationships between the elderly and their families; Saito (2015), based on in-depth interviews with the elderly and their home helpers, examines the way in which home helpers adjust their personal relationships with the elderly according to the physical and mental status of the elderly person; Hirayama (2017) examines the experiences of the adult sons who render care to their aging parents, focusing on the conundrum of masculinity in Japan, where adult daughters are far more likely to be caregivers. Gender is a topic around which much quantitative research has been conducted. For example, Kikuzawa (2016) found gender differences among caregivers in the use of various caregiving support.

With regard to child care, with more women with infants entering the labor force, and with more policy emphasis being given to curbing fertility decline, child care issues have attracted notable research interest. ‘Work–family balance’ is a key term in this research field. The determinants and outcomes of gendered divisions of housework among couples, and relatedly, attention on the relationship between motherhood and women’s employment, have been widely researched and discussed (Inaba et al., 2016; Nishimura, 2016). Factors that are likely to facilitate fathers’ participation in child care and household labor have also received much attention (Ishii-Kuntz, 2013; Matsuda, 2013).

With the expansion of social services aimed at preschool children including nursery schools, recent literature began to focus on the social relationships of mothers and other child care providers. Matsuki (2013), based on ethnomethodological fieldwork, documents how care providers manage standard family norms in their institutional practices. In the same vein, Toe (2018), based on conversation analyses of narratives, delineates the manner in which mothers’ identities are constructed in daily conversations. To adequately understand the correlates and outcomes of care in and outside families, more research will be needed in which qualitative findings are cross-validated and complemented by quantitative studies.

Social inequality and families

The second research field concerns social inequality and families. With the beginning of the economic recession and subsequent economic stagnation in the 1990s, sociological research in Japan at the turn of the century began to focus new attention on the changing nature of social inequality and poverty in Japanese society. Over the last two decades, family sociology has accumulated research evidence which elucidates the interconnection between social inequality and families.

With regard to family formation, much research has examined the relationship between marriage and economic statuses among men and women (Fukuda, 2013; Matsuda, 2013). Recent quantitative studies examine the mechanisms in which the economic statuses of men and women affect marriage and remarriage. For instance, Mugiyama (2017) showed that those on consistent non-regular employment trajectories are less likely to experience marriage.

Recent developments in research on divorce are worth noting. Divorce rates in Japan increased rapidly in the 1990s, and almost one in three marriages ends in divorce among recent marriage cohorts. Outcomes of divorces such as economic hardship of single parent households have received increasing attention. Though quantitative studies on divorce were limited in Japan due to the lack of representative data, research in the last two decades has documented various socio-economic differentials of divorces (Raymo et al., 2004). Quantitative research on intergenerational consequences of divorce has produced findings of particular importance: Yoda (2012) revealed that men and women whose father or mother was absent at the age of 15 are more likely to have low educational attainment; Inaba (2016) found that divorce of parents has negative effects on the quality of relationships between parents and their adult children; Yoshitake (2019) showed that men and women of divorced parents are more likely to experience divorce themselves.

Other related studies focus on the mechanisms which link family background to children’s outcomes. For example, Aramaki (2016) examined the effects of a family’s socio-economic background on the educational attainment of its children, focusing on cultural capital and other family-related variables which affect the aspirations and motivations of children. While qualitative studies that investigate the interconnections between inequality and families are limited, Chinen’s (2018) intriguing work which illuminated the realities of ‘being a family’ as described through an analysis of narratives by children from poor families, uncovered the mechanism through which family poverty impacts the life chances of children. Taken together, these studies suggest the further need to accumulate qualitative and quantitative evidence on how the changing economy and family problems intersect in Japanese society today.

Expansion of comparative research

The third research field is comparative family research. As collaboration among family sociologists increased through involvements in JSFS, opportunities for comparative research began to increase. Since the 2000s, JSFS has set the ‘globalization’ of research high on its agenda, and organized international sessions held in English at annual meetings (Ishii-Kuntz et al., 2014).

Widening availability of nationwide family surveys including the NFRJ and the influence of ‘welfare regime’ theories seem to have facilitated collaborations between family researchers and their colleagues in other countries (Ochiai, 2013). Widespread low fertility in East Asia appears to have fueled research interest in comparing families in East or South-East Asian countries. Kunio Ishihara organized a comparative research project with Chinese family researchers in the late 1990s, leading to a larger project of comparative family studies including Korea (Ishihara and Tabuchi, 2012). The project based on the East Asian Social Survey is another important example (Iwai and Yasuda, 2011 [2009]). A larger comparative project led by Emiko Ochiai, with a special focus on Asian modernity and families, has produced remarkable results as a series of publications both in English and Japanese (Ochiai and Hosoya, 2014). Ochiai’s project is intriguing in that it shows that a concept such as ‘familism’ is useful in explaining the similarities and diversities of families in East and South-East Asian societies. The development of comparative research based on analyses of social policies and qualitative methods is worth noting as well (Funabashi, 2006; Ochiai et al., 2007). More comparative studies by collaborating researchers working with a solid organizational basis are necessary to articulate the complex interrelationships of families, social policies, and cultures in Asian countries.

Diversity of families

The fourth research field concerns the increasing diversity of families in Japan. The pattern of family change in Japan is different from the one observed in Western countries (Rindfuss et al., 2010) and some argue that the Japanese family is still characterized by its traditional aspects. Since the late 1990s, however, with the demise of the ‘modern family’, recent studies have begun to shed light on how diverse family practices are experienced in contemporary Japan (Matsuki, 2017).

Of particular importance is the emerging body of research in the last decade that has focused on sexuality and families. The literature has revealed that families with members of minority sexualities tend to face particular difficulties in Japan, where prejudices and stigmas against sexual minorities are still strong. With regard to parent–child relationships, Sambe (2014) examined the processes and nature of change in parent–child relationships after LGB children come out to their parents. Motoyama (2019) revealed how families with an LGB member attempt to negotiate with standard social norms about sexuality. With regard to couple relationships, Kamano (2009) investigated how lesbian couples in Japan negotiate the meaning of housework and housewives in their daily lives. Kamiya (2017) attempted to describe the way in which gay couples experience and negotiate the conflicts surrounding ‘work–life balance’.

Another notable strand of research concentrates on the changing nature of kinship. Nobe (2018) examined the history and current status of adoptions in contemporary Japan, revealing how ‘blood ties’ acquired new meanings in the construction of adoptive parent–child relationships. Recent work on stepparenthood in Japan reveals diverse and changing family/kinship practices. Nozawa (2009), based on qualitative interviews with stepmothers, argues that the social norms emphasizing conventional parental roles tend to conflict with stepparent roles. Future research should explore how diverse family practices manage to cope with the strains arising from discrepancies between ideals and reality surrounding contemporary Japanese families.

Concluding remarks

This article reviewed the recent developments and current state of family sociology in Japan. Though this short essay fails to do justice to the variety and range of recent research, the literature reviewed here outlines both the changes in and continuity of Japanese family sociology over the last two decades. As COVID-19 has changed the way we relate to each other, future family sociology will have to tackle new issues and challenges. Family sociologists in Japan have a lot of work to do in scrutinizing current theoretical frameworks and integrating empirical findings to consolidate sociological family research in the decades to come.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 17H01006.

Notes

Author biography

Rokuro Tabuchi is Professor of Sociology at Sophia University in Japan. His major research topics are family sociology and sociology of generations. He has been the chair of the National Family Research Committee of the Japan Society of Family Sociology, and is the principal investigator of the most recent wave of National Family Research of Japan conducted in 2019. He is co-editor and author of Changing Families in Northeast Asia (Sophia University Press, 2012).

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