Japan’s Women Look at Marriage and Say No
TOKYO — The bride wore a birthday cake of a dress, with a scalloped-edge bodice and a large hoop skirt. Moments before the wedding began, she stood quietly on a staircase, waiting to descend to the ceremony.
“Wow,” she thought. “I’m really doing this.”
This was no conventional wedding to join two people in matrimony. Instead, a group of nearly 30 friends gathered in a banquet room in Tokyo to witness Sanae Hanaoka, 31, as she performed a public declaration of her love — for her single self.
“I wanted to figure out how to live on my own,” Ms. Hanaoka told the group, standing alone on a stage as she thanked them for attending her solo wedding. “I want to rely on my own strength.”
The percentage of women who work in Japan is higher than ever, yet cultural norms have not caught up: Japanese wives and mothers are still expected to bear the brunt of the housework, child care and help for their aging relatives.
Fed up with the double standard, Japanese women are increasingly opting out of marriage altogether, focusing on their work and newfound freedoms, but also alarming politicians preoccupied with trying to reverse Japan’s declining population.
As recently as the mid-1990s, only one in 20 women in Japan had never been married by the time they turned 50, according to census figures. But by 2015, the most recent year for which statistics are available, that had changed, with one in seven women unmarried by that age.
And for women ages 35 to 39, the per
centage was even higher: Nearly a quarter had never been married, compared with only about 10 percent two decades earlier.
A growing number of businesses now cater to single women. There are single karaoke salons featuring women-only zones, restaurants designed for solo diners, and apartment complexes that target women looking to buy or rent homes on their own.
“I thought, ‘If I get married, I will just have to do more housework,’” said Kayoko Masuda, 49, a cartoonist. “I loved my job, and I wanted to be free to do it.”
For more and more Japanese women, singlehood represents a form of liberation. “When they marry, they have to give up so many things,” said Mari Miura, a professor of political science at Sophia University in Tokyo.
The shift is tied to the changing Japanese work force. Close to 70 percent of women ages 15 to 64 now have jobs — a record. But if they marry, their careers are often held back by a relentless tide of domestic burdens.
Today, single Japanese women with careers and money have access to a wide range of activities and emotional outlets that their mothers or grandmothers did not.
“One reason to get married for a woman is to have a stable financial life,” said Miki Matsui, 49, a director at a Tokyo publishing house. “I don’t have any worries about being alone with myself or any financial worries.”
For some, married friends with children serve as cautionary tales. Shigeko Shirota, 48, who works at a preschool and lives in a condominium she bought herself, says many of her married friends stay home with their children and get little help from their husbands.
“It’s not fair for women to have to be stuck in their homes as housewives,” Ms. Shirota said. “They are happy as long as they are with their kids, but some of them just describe their husbands as a big baby.”
Singlehood has freed Ms. Shirota to travel and pursue her hobbies. Last summer she competed as a dancer in Ireland and then took her mother on a trip to China.
“We don’t have to rely on men anymore,” Ms. Shirota said.
Some men are reacting to economic realities by shying away from marriage as well. Wages in Japan have stagnated, and with the social expectation that men should be the primary breadwinners, many worry they will struggle to support a household financially. Just over a third of men ages 35 to 39 have never been married, up from less than a quarter 20 years ago.
But remaining single is often less of a deliberate stance than a reflection that the urgency to get married has diminished in today’s society, experts say.
“The data suggests very few women look at the lay of the land and say ‘I’m not going to marry,’ ” said James Raymo, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has written about marriage in Japan. Rather, he said, they “postpone and postpone and wait for the right circumstances, and then those circumstances never quite align and they drift into lifelong singlehood.”
Kaori Shibuya, 42, had a long-term relationship in her 20s that didn’t work out. She has dated occasionally since.
“I don’t think I have chosen a path,” she said. “But I have had all these chances along the way.”
Ms. Shibuya said some women choose marriage because they feel vulnerable on their own. But she started her own business two years ago — a cafe — and is confident she can support herself.
Being single comes with tradeoffs, too. Ms. Hanaoka, the woman who held a solo wedding last year, shares a house with two roommates. When loneliness creeps in, she pulls up the video of her ceremony to remind her of the people who love her.
“I would rather do what I want to do right now,” she said.