This is a pump-priming application to fund research for my second major project as an early career researcher. My goal is to examine Japanese demographic trends from an entirely new angle by investigating the effects of national demographic anxieties on Japanese attitudes towards motherhood at the social and personal levels. To do so, I explore the ways in which individuals-particularly women-approach issues of childbirth and childcare in the shadow of discourses of national demographic decline. I am opening up a completely new field of inquiry within work on the topic of Japanese demographic change in Japan studies, anthropology and the social sciences more broadly.
Of late, much scholarly attention has focused on the demographic challenges facing Japan, namely its ageing population and low fertility rate. Existing work has either examined such demographic issues as the result of economic stagnation and/or changing gender practices or hypothesised their future significance for the Japanese labour market and pension system. This overlooks an important dimension of Japan's demographic predicament: the ways in which discourses of demographic change also produce societal and ideological effects. These include reshaping the social meanings of motherhood and altering how individuals perceive their lives and life choices vis-à-vis the nation-state. In other words, the choices of a woman to work or have children, for instance, are no longer just personal when the consequences are socially understood to impact the future sustainability of the nation.
Using ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and text analysis, this project expands how we understand the effects of demographic change. It is the first to study demographic change by ethnographically engaging the personal experiences concerning its consequences for what it means to be (or not to be) a mother in Japanese society. It is the first step in a new research agenda with transnational comparative potential.
Building on this project, I am part of an international collaborative research project (Politics of Mothering in Contemporary Japan, Aya Kitamura (PI), 2023-2028, funded by Kaken Grants). This project will result in an edited volume on motherhood in Japan, to which I will contribute a chapter.
