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

本研究以人类学田野研究为基础，旨在探讨21世纪日本男性身份转变与日本文化变迁之间的关系。目前，公共和私营部门经常讨论出生率下降的问题。然而，这一论述往往集中在妇女问题上，如未婚人口和晚婚人数的增加，以及在抚养子女和工作方面谈判的困难。这项研究通过采访30岁以上的未婚男性，从男性的角度探讨了这一问题。此外，本研究还收集了白皮书、教科书、报纸、杂志和小说，并分析了这些文本中男性气概的表现。为了研究男性气概研究运动，本研究收集了日本国内外有关性别研究的书目，重点是文化人类学。因此，这项研究旨在通过研究男性的观点，特别是出生率下降的问题，来构建超越女性研究的性别研究。本研究的最终目的是通过关注男性身份和出生率下降来分析日本文化的变化过程。为了对此进行研究，本研究考察了家庭和婚姻观念的改变如何导致出生率下降。为此，我参加了2005年6月在日本举行的第九届亚洲研究年会上的一个小组讨论--“重温的家庭”。座谈结束后，我编辑了这个座谈会上的论文集，并将其发表在《家庭重温：工作文件》中。

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."