On Thursday, February 16th, the Hamilton Lugar School’s 21st Century Japan Politics and Society Initiative (21JPSI*) hosted Prof. Wei-hsin Yu (University of California, Los Angeles) in its in-person “Japan Politics & Society” multidisciplinary public speaker series. Dr. Yu is a sociologist and social demographer specializing in the areas of social stratification and gender inequality. Her research focuses on how macrolevel forces influence individuals, paying special attention to their labor market outcomes, family behaviors, and psychological health.
Prof. Yu’s campus engagement activities included a public lecture/seminar on “Dating and Marriage in Contemporary Japan,” which was cosponsored by Indiana University’s (IU) Department of Sociology, as well as various meals and intellectual exchanges with IU faculty. For the public seminar, roughly two dozen faculty, students, and staff gathered to hear Dr. Yu discuss the reasons why young adults in Japan seek out or avoid relationships and marriage, including the roles of marriage desires, economic considerations, and social environments.
During her remarks, Prof. Yu discussed Japan’s declining population and the related phenomenon of young adults delaying marriage—despite persistently high interest in the institution. Her talk compared the findings from her research, which analyzes this disconnect, with various theories that attempt to explain current marriage trends. These approaches typically attribute low marriage rates to economic factors, evolving attitudes towards marriage and children, changes in family and living arrangements, and structural issues in the marriage market.
After examining the logic and unresolved issues of each approach, Prof. Yu shared a number of insights from her research. In particular, she argued that economic explanations alone are insufficient for understanding the current state of marriage in Japan; additional factors, such as social dynamics and mismatched partner expectations, are also important. In addition, she pointed out that an individual’s self-reported desire to marry is only significant when accompanied by the “right” opportunities and circumstances, especially with regards to age.
After concluding her remarks, Prof. Yu engaged the audience in a lively Q&A session, which featured questions on topics ranging from potential policy solutions to the interaction of economic factors and family background on marriage prospects for young people in Japan.
*The 21st Century Japan Politics and Society Initiative (21JPSI) was launched at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies in 2018. Under the leadership of Founding Director and HLS faculty member Adam Liff, 21JPSI aims to invigorate and expand research, teaching, and programming on contemporary Japanese politics, society, and international (esp. U.S.-Japan) relations, and to educate, raise awareness, and debate policy responses to the various political, social, and foreign policy challenges that Japan faces in this extremely dynamic era of 21st-century change. Seeded by a generous $900,000 grant from the Japan Foundation, in its first five years 21JPSI has enabled a new tenure-track faculty line in contemporary Japanese politics and society; facilitated the creation of four new courses on contemporary Japan; launched a new multidisciplinary speaker series on Japanese Politics and Society, national conferences and webinars on U.S.-Japan relations, and academic manuscript workshops; and funded graduate fellowships and faculty travel grants to support field research in Japan. For more information, please see https://jpsi.indiana.edu/ or write to jpsi@iu.edu.