Home and Family in Japan

Richard Ronald is a Lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.  He is the co-editor of Housing and Social Transition in Japan, also published by Routledge.Allison Alexy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Lafayette College, USA.

• 1. Introduction: Continuity and Change in Japanese Homes and Families 2. Reassembling Familial Intimacy: Civil, Fringe, and Popular Youth Visions of the Japanese Home and Family 3. Reforming Families in Japan: Family Policy in the Era of Structural Reform 4. The Ideal, the Deficient, and the Illogical Family: An Initial Typology of Administrative Household Units 5. ‘I did not know how to tell my parents, so I thought I would have to have an abortion’: Experiences of Unmarried Mothers in Japan 6. Masculinity and the Family System: The Ideology of the ‘Salaryman’ across Three Generations 7. Working and Waiting for an ‘Appropriate Person’: How Single Women Support and Resist Family in Japan 8. Home ownership, Family Change and Generational Differences 9. Homes and Houses, Senses and Spaces 10. The Changing Face of Homelessness in Tokyo in the Modern Era 11. Coping with Hikikomori: Socially Withdrawn Youth and the Japanese Family 12. The Door My Wife Closed: Houses, Families, and Divorce in Contemporary Japan 13. Living Apart Together: Anticipated Home, Family and Social Networks in Old Age

"Home and Family in Japan makes a welcome contribution to our understanding of these trends in combining macro-level analysis with ethnographic case studies, and in examining not only shifts in personal attitudes and lifestyles but also the broader policy frameworks, and the physical spaces within which families’ lives in contemporary Japan take shape... the volume makes an important contribution to the literature on family change in Japan, as it goes beyond covering the more common themes—the attitudes of single women toward marriage and family—and addresses equally significant groups, including salarymen and elderly people, as well as the growing number of single, unmarried and divorced men and women whose experiences are of increasing importance for our understanding of family dynamics in contemporary Japan." - Aya Ezawa, Leiden University; Pacific Affairs Volume 86, No. 2 – June 2013