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Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid

of adult children’s duty towards aging parents. Women’s ideas become more traditional in this regard as they age, but both period and cohort effects nevertheless indicate declining support for close intergenerational relations. In contrast, attitudes toward traditional gender relations do not show a unilinear pattern of change. While the life-cycle effect is similar to that for intergenerational relations, gender-role attitudes became less traditional between 1993 and 2003 and reversed course after that. As Fukuda states, ‘‘gender-relation attitudes do not show a consistent shift among birth cohorts and survey periods’’ (p. 149). This finding mirrors Japanese media reports of opinion polls showing a slight return to more conservative gender-role attitudes in the past decade. Fukuda also examines the effect of marriage and childbearing on changes in gender-role attitudes and family-related attitudes. These analyses do not always yield clear results, and men’s attitudes in particular seem to vary over time in ways that are not very clear. Here, the often-found clustering of Japanese respondents into a middle ‘‘uncertain’’ or ‘‘neutral’’ category may be one source of difficult-to-interpret results. The clearest and most important finding of Fukuda’s analysis of how family events impact attitudes is that women tend to become more gender-role conservative after the birth of their first child. Several important questions remain unanswered in the book. To be clear, these are questions that Fukuda not only does not answer but also does not raise. I mention them here because of their great importance for understanding change in Japanese marriage and fertility behavior and, by implication, for interpreting Japan’s ‘‘low-fertility’’ trap. First, the book provides few clues as to why the proportion of never-married men and women has increased so dramatically in Japan over the past few decades. Given that so little childbearing in Japan occurs outside of marriage, this is a crucial issue to address in studying Japan’s very low birth rate. Second, the book includes virtually no discussion of the institutional context that inhibits work-family balance, working hours and organizational expectations for men and women in full-time jobs, or the dramatic labor market changes that have pushed more workers into non-standard, insecure jobs in Japan since the early 1990s. In focusing exclusively on articulating economic and value-based theories within a rational action framework and juxtaposing them as competing explanations, Fukuda neglects to consider how the institutional context (labor market structure, work norms, and family policies) as well as dramatic economic change provide the context for individuals’ decisions. As a result, the book does not offer insight into these macro-level features of the Japanese context to readers unfamiliar with them. This is a missed opportunity, one that results from Fukuda’s inclination to stick so closely to micro-level data sets and shy away from broader contextualization. In sum, the main contribution of Fukuda’s book is the detail it offers on how Japanese marriage and fertility behavior varies by individuals’ values and by the demographic correlates we conventionally care about the most: age, education, income, and occupation. Most of all, the book conveys that the path of family change in Japan is complex and that any path toward increasing the fertility rate is not likely to be straightforward.