Family dynamics: Establishing an on-site facility for accessing Japanese data for comparative research in Japan and UK

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This project will make a pioneering effort in setting up an onsite facility that will enable researchers to access data collected by the Statistics Bureau of Japan in Oxford. The data includes, but is not limited to such surveys as Labour Force Survey, Population Census, National Consumption Survey, Employment Status Survey, National Survey of Family Income and Expenditure, and Survey on Time Use and Leisure Activities. This is the first time when such data is being made available outside Japan and having such a facility will create a unique opportunity for UK and EU researchers across a number of academic disciplines (e.g. labour economics, demography, sociology) to use this data. Access to this collection of high-quality data will certainly lead to an increased interest in doing research on Japan among quantitative sociologists, economists, demographers and all social scientists at all career stages. We expect that this new data availability will encourage graduate students to choose Japan as their case study, ultimately leading to the rise in Japan specialists in the UK in the future generation of academics. The high quality of the data collected by the Statistics Bureau, and the fact that format of at least some of the surveys relies on the internationally accepted survey design mean that enabling researchers outside Japan, especially UK researchers, to access this data is also likely to lead to a rise in comparative research and collaborations between Japanese and UK researchers. With this project, we aim to spearhead such collaboration in the field of gender and time use. We will invite several Japanese colleagues to the UK to collaborate using Survey on Time Use and Leisure Activities. During their visit, we will organise a workshop to enable them to showcase their research and at the same time demonstrate the possibilities that access to the onsite facility in Oxford opens to UK researchers. This project will also be a showcase of research programmes:(a) Gender inequalities in domestic division labour and leisure activities in JapanThis study will analyze data of the Survey on Time Use and Leisure Activities, National Survey of Family Income and Expenditure, The Labor Force Survey, and Population Census to investigate gender differences in the participating types and social contexts of domestic work and care work in Japan between 1981 and 2011 and put our findings on Japan into comparative perspective using time use data from the UK.(b) "Time use" of single mothers: Another look at poverty and social exclusion in Japan Using the data of the Survey on Time Use and Leisure Activities, this project will provide statistically reliable insights into time use of Japanese single mothers and investigate the problems of "time poverty" that single mothers are facing.(c) Consequences of "Welfare-to-Work" Policies for Time Use of Single Mothers: A Comparison between the UK and JapanThis study will evaluate impacts of the welfare-to-work policy reforms on the time use of single mothers in the UK and Japan, using data from The Survey on Time Use and Leisure Activities for Japan and Time Use Survey for the UK.(d) Family Formation and Time Allocation in Great Britain and JapanThis study will examine the dynamics of women's and men's paid work time and housework time during the formation and development of families as well as changes in those dynamics. (e) Married Women's Labour Market Conditions and Transition to Motherhood in JapanThis study will explore how the gendered labour market is associated with women's fertility behaviour in Japan. It will examine whether and how Japanese women's employment status and workplace conditions (part-time/full-time employment, industrial sex segregation, corporation size, occupation) at the point of marriage correlate with their transition to first childbirth.