Suchergebnisse

A three-level project has been carried out to fulfil the mission of creating common foundations for international research collaboration within and on Asia. The first level is the collection, translation and sharing of important research findings from Asian insider perspectives that had been published or presented in the various languages in Asia. The second is to create a common basis for empirical research by building a database for international comparison. On the third level, effective international collaborative research projects focusing on various topics are made possible. Diversity in Asia has usually been taken to mean diversity of civilisations, but, at a deeper level is found the diversity rooted in kinship structure. This layer plays particularly important roles in constructing local forms of family, gender and intimacy. On top of these, modernisation created another layer. These layers influence each other at various times and to various degrees, constructing a dynamic diversity.

The coastal villages in southwestern Japan are known for its peculiar historical demographic features involving frequent pre-marital births and births without parents being married and frequent movement of children between households. This article explores habits regarding sex, marriage, and births behind these demographic features. It draws on an interview with an elderly woman who tells her own experiences and what she observed during most of her life time. The focus is on the woman's subjectivity and how she interprets the relative sexual freedom that women in this area seem to have been granted. Her testimony often differs from interpretations offered in ethnographic research. Both the optimistic view praising sexual freedom as well as the contrasting view that deplores women's victimization seem inadequate to grasp the woman's testimony. According to her recollections intrusion into a married relationship often occurred, the father of children of pre-marital births was not necessarily the man who later became the husband of the mother, and child abuse by the mother's new husband sometimes occurred. It also occurred that a woman abandoned her previous man to go with a new man. Love seems to have been a matter of great concern to both men and women in this region. The cost of sexual behaviours existed but it was not very high, partially because of economic independence of women, partially because of social support networks for taking care of the children born.

"Fertility in some East Asian societies has declined to a new global low level, which can be called 'ultra-low fertility'. The first question of this article is whether East Asia is going through a second demographic transition just like Europe. The second question is whether individualism is the cause of the change. The answer to the first question is both yes and no, because the demographic changes currently underway in East Asia have similarities to those in Europe and North America, but there are considerable differences in essence. Unlike Europe, where cohabitation is replacing marriage, marriage as an institution of duty and responsibility rather than intimacy is still intact in East Asia. Because of that, risk-aversive individualization occurred to avoid the burden of a family. It is not individualism but familialism that is causing the current demographic and family changes in East Asia. Different degrees of compression of modernity created the varieties of familialism: familialist reform in Japan and 'liberal familialism' in other societies. We may conclude that both types of familialism have failed in constructing a sustainable social system." (author's abstract)

AbstractThis paper tries to bridge the micro‐level analyses of social networks for "care" provision which have been conducted in the field of family sociology, and the macro‐level framework on welfare mix which has been developed in the area of welfare sociology, because the options for creating social networks are given to individuals by society. A group of Asian researchers including the author have conducted comparative research on social networks for childcare and elderly care in six Asian societies, namely Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, and Japan. To reexamine the results, the author draws diagrams of the care diamonds in each society for each type of care (childcare or elderly care) to show the balance between four sectors (the state, market, family and relatives, and the community) which determines the pattern of welfare mix. The most prevalent pattern in Asian societies today is the pattern with a large family and relatives sector and a large market sector. We can interpret it as a familistic welfare regime combined with liberalism. However, Japan alone shows a pattern close to pure familism because the development of the market sector is restricted by immigration policies prohibiting the employment of foreign domestic workers. Unlike other Asian societies which were exposed to the global market before the family could become a closed organization and marketization of care work took place easily, in Japan, where the modern family system had been established, both socialization and marketization of care work have stagnated.