Tough Choices Bearing an Illegitimate Child in Japan [Hardcover]

As is the case in Western industrialized countries, Japan is seeing a rise in the number of unmarried couples, later marriages, and divorces. What sets Japan apart, however, is that the percentage of children born out of wedlock has hardly changed in the past fifty years. This book provides the first systematic study of single motherhood in contemporary Japan.

Seeking to answer why illegitimate births in Japan remain such a rarity, Hertog spent over three years interviewing single mothers, academics, social workers, activists, and policymakers about the beliefs, values, and choices that unmarried Japanese mothers have. Pairing her findings with extensive research, she considers the economic and legal disadvantages these women face, as well as the cultural context that underscores family change and social inequality in Japan. This is the only scholarly account that offers sufficient detail to allow for extensive comparisons with unmarried mothers in the West.

In recent years Japan has seen dramatic demographic changes, but extramarital childbirth remains taboo. Hertog convincingly demonstrates the remarkable staying power of the norm of the two-parent family, as conveyed in the poignant words of women who, for myriad reasons, gave birth out of wedlock. I found Hertog's book to be an excellent study of unwed mothers' perspectives and social conditions. It contributes to a growing body of studies that explore changing Japanese families, and demonstrates how ethnography can enhance understanding of family formation and life choices. Hertog's work offers a detailed analysis of her own extensive qualitative study over three years, comprising in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 68 diverse women already or about to become unmarried mothers. The book comprehensively and engagingly addresses what the author identifies as a puzzling dearth of scholarly interest in unwed motherhood in Japan . . . The work deftly combines a statistical and theoretical disculSÁ