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"Japan was the first Asian country to become a mature industrial society, and throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, was viewed as an "all-middle-class society". However since the 1990s there have been growing doubts as to the real degree of social equality in Japan, particularly in the context of dramatic demographic shifts as the population ages whilst fertility levels continue to fall. This book compares Japan with America, Britain, Italy, France, Germany, Sweden and Taiwan in order to determine whether inequality really is a social problem in Japan. With a focus on impact demographic shifts, Sawako Shirahase examines female labour market participation, income inequality among households with children, the state of the family, generational change, single person households and income distribution among the aged, and asks whether increasing inequality and is uniquely Japanese, or if it is a social problem common across all of the societies included in this study. Crucially, this book shows that Japan is distinctive not in terms of the degree of inequality in the society, but rather, in how acutely inequality is perceived. Further, the data shows that Japan differs from the other countries examined in terms of the gender gap in both the labour market and the family, and in inequality among single-person households - single men and women, including lifelong bachelors and spinsters - and also among single parent households, who pay a heavy price for having deviated from the expected pattern of life in Japan. Drawing on extensive empirical data, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars interested in Japanese culture and society, Japanese studies and social policy more generally"--

This research examines the elderly missing women phenomenon - masculinized sex ratios in the elderly population from a fourfold approach. First, it systematizes the causal factors responsible for missing women according to different stages of the female life course (before/at birth, childhood, young adulthood, adulthood and old age) to reveal an elderly missing women phenomenon. The categorization emphasizes that the majority of literature to date has focused on the first two stages while neglecting the cumulative impact of factors affecting missing women at later stages and especially old age. Second, it evaluates the elderly missing women phenomenon in all countries across Asia. It shows that while the missing women phenomenon is well researched in specific countries of East/Southeast Asia and South Asia, it is mostly ignored in the Middle Eastern region of Western Asia where the extent of the female deficit is worse. Further, even in the former regions the issue is mostly addressed at young ages. In light of the rapid ageing of Asia, this points to the necessity of changing the geographical focus of literature on missing women from younger to older age groups in East/Southeast and South Asia and place a greater emphasis on the Middle Eastern region as a whole. Third, using Pakistan as a case study, it considers whether the elderly missing women phenomenon observable in the elderly populations of some Asian countries may be the result of a second set of possible group effects, namely demographic shocks. An evaluation of conflicts and natural disasters throughout the history of Pakistan, however, reveals that the first set of group effects (i.e. factors across the life course) need to be given greater weightage in explaining the phenomenon. Finally, it examines the empirical strength of the factors, forces and exogenous shocks responsible for missing women by assigning variables to these causal machanisms and testing their strength at the cross national level. The results reveal that, when evaluated in an ordinary least squares framework, the number of variables that are significant increases when the elderly population versus the total population is used as the dependent variable. This shows that the true severity of the missing women phenomenon only becomes evident when evaluating the elderly missing women phenomenon because the latter considers the consequences of a female deficit from all life stages. By analyzing the elderly missing phenomenon in this manner, this research shows that the life course perspective is the ideal framework to analyze the missing women phenomenon in general and the elderly missing women phenomenon in particular.