Marriage, Fertility and Rapid Population Aging: Japan’s Distinctive Demographic Landscape
Tuesday, April 30, 201912:30 PM - 2:00 PM (Pacific)
McClatchy Hall, Building 120, Studio 40
450 Serra Mall
Stanford University
EMERGING ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY ASIA
A Special Seminar Series
RSVP required by Friday, April 29, 2019
ABSTRACT: Japan’s population is the oldest in the world and will continue to shrink for the foreseeable future. My first goal in this talk is to provide an overview of Japan’s distinctive demographic landscape, focusing on rapid population aging and its policy implications while also emphasizing the role that declining rates of marriage have played in accelerating population aging via their impact on fertility. After describing the centrality of marriage behavior to our understanding of demographic and societal trends in Japan, my second goal is to present results of new research documenting an unexpected reversal in educational differences in women’s marriage. For decades, highly-educated women have married later and more often remained unmarried than their less-educated counterparts – a pattern thought to reflect the high opportunity costs of marriage in Japan’s gender inegalitarian society. However, my analyses of recent data show that women with a university degree are now more likely than high school graduates to marry, a shift that hints at the possibility of changing norms and expectations regarding women’s employment and economic contributions to the family. Concurrent trends toward continued decline in marriage among low-educated men and women are consistent with emphases on the deteriorating economic circumstances of this group.
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