Home and Family in Japan

Continuity and Transformation

Edited by Richard Ronald, Allison Alexy

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About the Book

The traditional family and family house, often portrayed in ideal terms as key foundations of Japanese society, have been subject to significant changes in recent years. This book explores the degree to which traditional patterns of both houses and households are changing. It examines the social, economic and urban changes which are causing these changes, discusses the shift from the stem family to the nuclear family and to a situation where there are large numbers of single person and childless couple households, and elderly people living in nursing homes, and explores new patterns in family relationships. It also discusses new rhetoric about the family, and new concepts of self and family role fulfilment.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction Richard Ronald and Allison Alexy 2. Youth Agency, Intergenerational Relationships and a Child-led Vision of the 21st Century Japanese Family Bruce White 3. Coping with Hikikomori: Socially Withdrawn Youth and the Japanese Family Sachiko Horiguchi 4. Unwed Mothers and Negotiations of Illegitimacy: ‘I did not know how to tell my parents so I thought I would have to have an abortion’ Ekaterina Hertog 5. Masculinity and the Family System: The Ideology of the Salaryman and Daikokubashira across Three Generations Tomoko Hidaka 6. 'If you buy it, he will come': Housing Strategies of Unmarried Women in Tokyo Lynne Nakano 7. Legislating Ideals: Conceptions of ‘Ie’ and the Registration of Households Karl Jakob Krogness 8. The Housing System and Family Formation: Intergenerational Fragmentations in Life-Courses Yosuke Hirayama 9. Sense and Space: Transformations in Homes and Urban Housing Richard Ronald 10. Home and Homelessness in Contemporary Japan Akihiko Nishizawa 11. ‘When I got divorced, my single friends said "Welcome Home!"’: Divorce in Family Lives Allison Alexy 12. Rethinking and Reorganizing Dwelling Spaces: Home, Family and Social Networks in Old Age Anemone Platz 13. Reforming Families in Japan: Family Policy in the Era of Structural Reform Takeda Hiroko 14. Epilogue Allison Alexy and Richard Ronald

About the Author(s)

Richard Ronald is a research fellow at the OTB Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies at Delft Technical University, the Netherlands.


Allison Alexy is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University