Divorce Rate in Japan

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 taugh

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fluenced by the legal system and its social conditions. The overall divorce rate in Japan can be charted since the beginning of the century. The rate was high at the beginning of the century, and it dropped in the early 1940s to the lowest divorce rate in Japan in modern history. It then increased during the post-war stage of industrialization to a level that was the same as in the early 1900s an double the rate of the early 1940s. The post-war increase is thought to have been due primarily to a decline in the importance of the traditional values of the extended family, an increase in the employment of married women, and a decrease in women's role in family building. This does not explain the high divorce rate at the beginning of the century, however (Fukurai and Alston 453-454). The Japanese divorce rate stands at about one-third that of the United States and one-half that of Western Europe, and Japan is the only country among developed countries except Italy that belongs to the low divorce rate group. The family remains a powerful force in Japan, and women give up divorce for the sake of their children because parental love is much stronger than conjugal love. The divorce system in Japan may be another reason for the low
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