A more traditional society such as Japan has been held out as an example of what the West should be, but in truth the divorce rate has been increasing in Japan over the last decade, leading to the question as to why this is happening.
In 1993, divorces in Japan reached an all-time high of 189,000, and at the same time the birth rate fell to 9.6 births per 1,000 people as the total births decreased 17 percent to 1.19 million, below 1.2 million for the first time ("Japanese Births Mark a Low" A8). This is troubling to a country where family and family relations are so central to the social structure. The Japanese are from birth influenced by their society's emphasis on social interdependence. One way of describing Japanese human development is as a movement toward mastery of an ever-expanding circle of social life, beginning with the family, widening to include school and neighborhood as children grow, and incorporating roles as colleague, inferior, and superior. Socialization thus does not culminate with adolescence, for the individual must still learn to accept other roles. Many Westerners ask whether a Japanese self exists apart from identification with a group, and the answer is found in the Japanese distinction between uchi (inside) and soto (outside). The inside implied in uchi can refer to the individual, the family, a work group, a company, a neighborhood, or even all of Japan, but it always stands in opposition to "they." From childhood, Japanese are taught that this level of self should not be assertive but should instead be considerate of others (Dolan and Worden 111).
The earliest locus of social life is the family, and the family provides a model of social organization for most later encounters with the wider world. The Japanese family, however, does not have clear boundaries, and at times the term may refer to a nuclear family of parents and unmarried children, while at other times it may refer to a l...