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This paper analyzes the interaction between non-regular employment of women and economic growth pattern by overlapping-generations model, mainly based on Galor and Weil(1996), Groezen, Leers and Mejidam(2003), and Cardak(2004). In this paper, we assume that there are two types of individuals, men and women, depending on Galor and Weil(1996), and household's utility level is influenced by their own consumption level, childcare time, and the educational expenditure to their children, mainly based on Cardak(2004). We assume that a household assigns the leisure to childcare and extend the analysis of human capital accumulation in Cardak(2004). In this paper, we assume that the individual's human capital level is determined by the parental human capital level, educational expenditure from his/her parents, and parental childcare time. Moreover, we introduce pay-as-you-go pension system in the model, which depends on Groezen, Leers and Mejidam(2003), and consider the effect of public pension policy to rise the rate of pension insurance on fertility rate, nationwide human capital accumulation, and economic growth pattern. This paper is motivated by declining birthrate, aging population and rising the rate of pension insurance in Japan. In recent Japan, although women have same educational background and ability as men, most women become non-regular employment after marriage and delivery, and it reduces household income and increases the burden imposed on educational expenditure. We find that non-regular employment of women and the public pension policy to rise the annuity price fall fertility rate and it may have negative effect on economic growth in a whole country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan has one of the world's most family‐friendly parental leave systems. However, a government survey conducted in 2020 found that less than 13 percent of male respondents exercised their right to take paternity leave, leaving the burden of child‐rearing to the mothers. Although Japan's Government has made parental leave a top priority, the effects on society are still modest. Work culture, labor regulation, and gender bias are some of the challenges in the imbalanced parenting problem. Solving a society‐related issue requires a holistic approach that considers complex multidimensional aspects. This paper uses the Unified Architecture Framework to model a Social Enterprise by investigating the Japanese parenting problem. We use the challenges and drivers identified in the Japanese case to explore viewpoints that place the human aspect of parenting together with business and policymaking. Lastly, we introduce the next parenting phase considering principles from Society 5.0. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over time, Japan has seen an increase in non‐regular employment and a shift away from marriage. To uncover any link between these issues, this paper uses Japanese Labour Force Survey microdata to examine annual transitions between marital statuses and how such transitions vary across labour market statuses, in particular between male regular and non‐regular employees. We find, for different age groups, that the odds ratio of marriage for male non‐regular employees is 30% to 40% lower than that for male regular employees even after controlling for education. We also find that the odds ratio of divorce for married couples is twice as large when the husband is a non‐regular employee than when the husband is a regular employee. Our analysis sheds light on the challenges faced by Japanese males with non‐regular jobs in enjoying stable marital relationships and it reveals the regional heterogeneity of such challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital foodscapes not only transform our everyday relationships with food but offer creative and entrepreneurial opportunities. This paper works to expand the Anglo-American focus of digital foodscapes scholarship in analysis of Japanese Instagram food influencers and their relationship to gendered social reproduction. Japan's most prominent influencers are mothers documenting the bentos (boxed lunches) they prepare for their children, a meal suffused with socio-cultural meaning about good food and good mothering. I develop the concept of precarious digital mothering to examine the hidden, gendered labor created and magnified through Instagram bento accounts. I argue that the creative and entrepreneurial opportunities offered to women though Instagram are inseparable from the cultural meaning of bento as a judgment on good mothering and create a bind where digital success cannot occur without taking on additional domestic food work. Precarity is created both for the mothers who take on unpaid and unrecognized labor in the pursuit of Instagram success, and those who consume their content and the problematic narratives of food and motherhood it normalizes in its idealized and mediated performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether the gender identity, "a wife should not earn more than her husband," affects the market work and non-market work of married women in Japan. Empirical analyses used the data from the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers (1993–2016) revealed that: 1) The distribution of the wives' relative incomes (the share of the couple's income earned by the wife) exhibits a sharp drop at the point of 50%, where the wives' income exceed the husbands' income; 2) Wives with a high potential for earning more than their husbands are more likely to refrain from entering the job market to avoid deviating from the gender identity. However, when they do choose to work, they do not manage their income to avoid violating the gender identity; and, 3) Wives' hours of non-market work, such as housework and childcare, increase when the wives' relative incomes exceed approximately 60–72%. Although the impacts of the gender identity on market work diminished after the 2008 financial crisis, the gender identity influenced non-market work more strongly after the crisis. Married women dedicated more hours to housework to mitigate the costs of deviating from the gender identity caused by participating in the labor market after the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to provide a chronicle and analysis of how the household accounting role for women in Meiji era Japan was created, starting with the government's hurried introduction of 'bookkeeping' and 'home economics' as separate disciplines, followed by its later 'Japanisation' and gender assignment of these subjects and ending with its consequent popularisation in Japan of keeping track of the inflow and outflow of money in a household (receipts and disbursements, and bookkeeping) that eventually led to the unification of both disciplines into a single system of 'household bookkeeping'. Our work also sheds light on how the introduction of Western-style bookkeeping and its customisation to Japanese needs played a role in the development of Meiji-era household accounting education in Japan, and in so doing helped lay down the groundwork for the establishment of the country's future social fabric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims Psychological distress is associated with poor prognosis in patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD). However, factors related to psychological distress in elderly patients with CVD are less understood. We aim to investigate the rate of psychological distress in elderly patients with CVD in comparison with that of patients without CVD and to examine the clinical, socio-economic, and lifestyle factors associated with this condition. Methods and results Data from a nationwide population-based study in Japan of patients aged ≥60 years were extracted, and 1:1 propensity score matching was conducted of patients with and without CVD. Psychological distress was assessed using the K6 scale, on which a score ≥6 was defined as psychological distress. Of the 24 388 matched patients, the rate of psychological distress was significantly higher among patients with CVD compared with those without CVD (29.8 vs. 20.5%, P < 0.0001). The multivariate analysis revealed that female sex, comorbidities, except for hypertension, current smoking status, daily sleep duration of <6 vs. ≥8 h, home renter vs. owner, retired status, having a walking disability, and lower monthly household expenditure were independently associated with psychological distress. Walking disability was observed to be in greatest association with psychological distress (odds ratio 2.69, 95% confidence interval 2.46–2.93). Conclusion Elderly patients with CVD were more likely to have psychological distress compared with those without CVD. Multiple factors, including clinical, socio-economic, and lifestyle variables, were associated with psychological distress. These analyses may help healthcare providers to identify high-risk patients with psychological distress in a population of older adults with CVD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The future of work has become a prominent topic for research and policy debate. However, the debate has focused entirely on paid work, even though people in industrialized countries on average spend comparable amounts of time on unpaid work. The objectives of this study are therefore (1) to expand the future of work debate to unpaid domestic work and (2) to critique the main methodology used in previous studies. To these ends, we conducted a forecasting exercise in which 65 AI experts from the UK and Japan estimated how automatable are 17 housework and care work tasks. Unlike previous studies, we applied a sociological approach that considers how experts' diverse backgrounds might shape their estimates. On average our experts predicted that 39 percent of the time spent on a domestic task will be automatable within ten years. Japanese male experts were notably pessimistic about the potentials of domestic automation, a result we interpret through gender disparities in the Japanese household. Our contributions are providing the first quantitative estimates concerning the future of unpaid work and demonstrating how such predictions are socially contingent, with implications to forecasting methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on gender stereotypes in the care roles of women, specifically in housework related to meal preparation, and how this may impact the development of caring skills in adolescents. The conceptual framework includes DeVault's (1991) concept of the invisibility of women's work, Mason's (1996) description of sentient activities as a skilled activity that can be developed through training, and Neely's (2014) classification of social relationships in food practices of young people.

The last decade has seen the rise of Japanese methods of decluttering, adding everyday stuff to the increasing number of things that the modern subject must manage to gain a sense of wellbeing. This article examines Danshari by Yamashita Hideko and the Konmari method by Kondō Marie. Using the 'affective affordances' of objects as an analytic lens, I will argue that paying attention to everyday practices of decluttering reveals a close connection between material landscapes, gendered subjectivities and competing ethics of personhood. These connections only become visible when we put the decluttering methods in the context of the gendered expectations regarding attachment towards objects and their care in domestic work. Objects serve as an integral part of the affective regulation of everyday life; their careful or wasteful treatment is closely linked with ethical consumption and moral personhood. Attachments to objects and injunctions against wastefulness make ridding a morally fraught task. By contrasting a close reading of the two methods with insights gained from fieldwork on everyday disposal, I will trace the ways in which affect is mobilized in order to get rid of things and put this in the broader context of consumer capitalism in twenty-first century Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guided by equity theory, we examine how hours of housework by spouse, perceived fairness of housework division, and joint decision-making predict marital quality in Japan. Our analysis of data from the Survey of Midlife Development in Japan (MIDJA) shows that husbands who say their wives perform more hours of housework than themselves report higher marital quality, while no comparable pattern is present for wives. On the other hand, perceived fairness of housework division has a positive effect on marital quality for wives only. Regardless of gender, joint decision-making positively affects marital quality, although this effect is larger for women. We conclude that even in marriages with an uneven division of housework, which are common in societies such as Japan with serious labour market gender inequalities, joint decision-making may allow for greater empathy and less strain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantitative comparisons of living standards across Eurasia continue to conclude that the eastern side of the "great divergence," including Japan, lagged behind the leading regions of Europe from early‐modern times onwards. The "industrious revolution" model attributes this to the early spread in Europe of markets for labour and consumer goods. By contrast, in Japan, persistent household self‐sufficiency must have precluded improvements driven by market participation. However, qualitative evidence on the history of the now globally renowned Japanese diet reveals how a different dietary pattern, involving continued household‐based, non‐market production activities, might nonetheless have generated improved living standards, even if these are invisible to quantitative assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Although gender stereotypes regarding paid work and unpaid work are changing, most wives are responsible for taking care of the family and home in Japan. It is unclear how time spent on housework and childcare has changed between working men and women during the COVID‐19 pandemic in Japan. The purpose of this study is to investigate how working men and women's responsibilities for housework and childcare changed during the COVID‐19 pandemic in Japan depending on work hours, job type, the number of employees in the workplace, and frequency of telecommuting. Methods: A cross‐sectional analysis (N = 14,454) was conducted using data from an Internet monitoring study (CORoNa Work Project), which was conducted in December 2020. A multilevel logistic model with nested prefectures of residence was conducted to estimate the odds ratio (OR) for change in time devoted to housework and childcare among men and women adjusting for age, household income, presence of spouse who work, work hours, job type, the number of employees in the workplace, frequency of telecommuting, and the incidence rate of COVID‐19 by prefecture. Results: More women tended to perceive that their time of housework and/or childcare had been changed (increased housework: OR 1.92, 95% CI [1.71–2.16], P <.001; decreased workhours: 1.66 (1.25–2.19), P <.001: increased childcare: OR 1.58, 95% CI [1.29–1.92], P <.001; decreased childcare: 1.11 (0.62–2.00), P =.719). Conclusions: The time spent by women on housework and childcare changed significantly compared to men during the COVID‐19 pandemic in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan's gender gap in housework—the second largest in the OECD countries—has come sharp focus with its female employment on the rise. Why are women and men in Japan still struggling to share housework? This article examines this question, analysing relatively newly emerged representations of 'kaji-hara'. The Japanese neologism 'kaji-hara'—a shortened form of the phrase 'housework harassment'—has garnered much public attention, since Japan's leading home builder Asahi Kasei Homes Corporation (AKHC) launched its 'Wives' Housework Harassment' campaign in 2014. The campaign conveyed a contentious message—that is, it is not husbands, but actually wives, who act as a bottleneck to gender equality in housework. This received a negative backlash, ultimately leading to the phenomenon of what I label here as the 'kaji-hara debates'. Based upon analysis of AKHC's campaign ads, its online survey results, literature and media coverage that inform the kaji-hara debates, this article shows the operation of the 'gendering of housework', by which housework is gendered and produces gender itself, thereby perpetuating the housework gender gap in the society. It argues that AKHC's campaign constitutes the gendering of housework, as it represents, assumes and commercialises housework as 'women's primary responsibility' while simultaneously promoting men's domesticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the association between women's educational levels and housework participation across cultural contexts and through different stages in the life-course. In testing the suggestion from previous research that women with higher levels of education spend less time on housework than do women with less education, we found that this argument holds true for single women in Japan, Taiwan, and the United States. Our results also indicate that for all American women and for single and married Taiwanese women without children, their numbers of years of education correlate inversely with their daily hours of domestic labour; however, this correlation does not exist for married Taiwanese women with children. Similarly, the educational levels of married Japanese women—with or without children—have no bearing on their housework participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]