Declining Birth Rate and Male Identities: The Process of Changing Japanese Culture

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This research aims to explore the relationship between changing male identities and changing Japanese culture in twenty-first century Japan, and is grounded in anthropological field research. In the current moment, the issue of declining birth rate is often discussed in public and private sectors. This discourse, however, tends to be focused on women's issues, such as the increase of unmarried people and of later marriage, and the difficulty in negotiating child-rearing and work. This research explores the issue from men's perspectives by interviewing unmarried men over thirty. In addition, this research collects white papers, textbooks, newspapers, magazines, and novels and analyzes the representation of masculinity in those texts. In order to research the masculinity studies movement, this research collects bibliography on gender studies in and outside Japan, focusing on cultural anthropology. Thus, this research aims to contribute to constructing gender studies beyond women's studies by researching men's points of views, specifically on the issues of declining birth rate.The final goal of this research is to analyze the process of changing Japanese culture by focusing on male identities and declining birth rate. In order to investigate it, this research examines how perspective changes in family and marriage led to the declining birth rate. For this purpose, I participated a panel "The Family Revisited," which took place at the Ninth Annual Asian Studies Conference Japan on June 2005. After the panel, I edited and published the collections of papers on this panel into "The Family Revisited : Working Papers."