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The Japanese Bachelor Crisis
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16288 |
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CULTURE
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3 / 1989 |
3,300 Words |
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Ralph D. Sawyer
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Modern Japan, which emerged as an economic giant after surviving a century of domestic and international crisis, finds itself in the midst of a predicament that its vaunted industrial and technical expertise can never resolve. This is the "bachelor crisis," at once real and suddenly significant in the lives and consciousness of single men. It poses a problem with astounding implications, causing turbulence in society's basic fabric and expectations.
The crisis has been developing for decades, for it is a question of the relative numbers of men and women of marriageable age. But only in 1987, following the annual census of 1986 and several supplementary population and marriage expectation studies, did it begin to grow in the national awareness. As consciousness of the crisis expanded and the problem suddenly became newsworthy, the basic data was manipulated to depict ever bleaker prospects for single men, particularly when the more sensationalist publications trumpeted the disaster. What might be considered the pivotal instigatory article appeared in the June 1987 Japanese-language issue of Playboy, entitled "The Day When Men Cannot Get Married." The same month's Japanese edition of Penthouse also scrutinized the statistics, and virtually every other magazine--whether men's or women's weeklies, or monthlies--as well as the newspapers, quickly followed suit.
The essence of the crisis is simply that men in the marriage age bracket significantly outnumber women. Depending upon which age groups are compared, the ratio falls between eight and a half to nine women for every ten males. The authoritative weekly Asahi Journal noted both the problem and the growing crisis consciousness, but chose to focus upon somewhat wider age brackets than other publications. Accepting the traditional ideal age difference of approximately five years between marriage partners to match men age 25 to 39 with women 20 to 34, it found an incredible surplus of 1,860,000 men nationwide. Penthouse, on the other hand, based its comparison on a 1985 survey of the First Kangyo Bank that indicated the ideal marriage age for men as 28.6 years and women 24.8 years. Accordingly, it focused upon men in the 25 to 29 age bracket and women from 20 to 24, discovering an excess of more than 660,000 men or less than nine women for very ten men. This, they emphatically proclaimed, dooms one of every ten men to everlasting bachelorhood!
The Japanese are characterized, by themselves as well as by outsiders, as being highly oriented toward--even obsessed with--analysis, including self-analysis. Naturally, the census statistics were immediately subject to minute scrutiny, perhaps in an effort to discover whether a million young women might not be hiding in some remote area. Lists of the "best five" and "worst five" locales--of course, from the male point of view--quickly appeared. Bachelors were frequently heard in after hours drinking sessions joking with each other about going to Nara, where the ratio of men to women is ten to twelve, or Saga, where it soars to a dreamlike to ten to thirteen, the highest of any prefecture. Others complained about being transferred to offices in Kanagawa, essentially a suburb of Tokyo, where the ratio plummets to a frightening ten men to eight women, or to remote areas deserted by teenage girls infatuated with the allure of the cities. However, even in metropolitan Tokyo, which totally dominates the nation's economic, political, social and cultural life, the ratio remains a disappointing one hundred men to ninety-three women, despite the massive influx of
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