In recent decades, Japan has become a rapidly aging, low-birthrate society. Late marriage and no marriage have also become commonplace. With the prolonged recession, stable employment declined, wages dropped, and the reputation of the prototypical "salaryman" of the postwar period took a beating. In this milieu, how do young adults feel about conventional gender roles? Have attitudes changed in regard to marriage and childrearing, and if so, how? How do the unmarried envision themselves in the future, and how do the married wish to raise their children? In this interview study, diverse views can be heard, but those relating to childbearing and rearing remain fairly conservative. Furthermore, expectations that women should be solely responsible for the "double shift" of household labor and caregiving upon marriage, as well as continued discrimination against women in the workplace and a workplace culture of long hours, appear to underlie the hesitancy young adults have in acting on their dreams in the recessionary economy.

I would be glad to meet with those engaged in similar research to my own.

Japan is gradually becoming a nation that depends on diverse migrant labor. It is important to integrate immigrant populations into society early to avoid the later conflicts and mutual mistrust found elsewhere.This study will investigate the social inclusion of migrants at multiple levels. At a time when the Japanese government is expanding the categories and lengths of stay of migrant workers to ease the labor shortages accompanying drastic population decline, this project seeks to understand how newcomer migrant labor will be welcomed and integrated into the workplace and the community.Together with my RA, I visited the JA office in Kyoto, in July 2019, interviewing at two chicken farms, meeting some foreigner ginou jisshusei and Special Skilled Workers 1. On 12/3 we met farmers from Aichi at a reception in Tokyo where they had attended a presentation by the Ministry of Agriculture.<BR>On 12/19, we returned to Kyoto-fu with the JA staff to discuss with local town representatives and a chicken farm manager how the foreign workers might get involved in town events. We saw farms in Yawata and learned of farmers' difficulties in securing workers who would stay long-term. We visited a JA meeting for local farmers, where a representative explained the new SSWI system.<BR>We participated in two academic conferences:RA Noriko Fujita presented her research on 10/20 at a Diversity panel of the Japan Society of Policy Studies. The second conference was the Japan Labor Sociology conference on 11/3, where we heard a talk on dairy farms in Hokkaido. My RA and I compiled our preliminary findings from our field trips into a talk for the Waseda University/U. Birmingham international NODE migration conference in December, 2019.On 5 February, we visited the town in Aichi where we had been invited to return, interviewing five women farmers about their roles managing foreign workers. They invited us back to stay for a longer trip, to do a homestay in order to understand more about their farming lives and needs.I and my research assistant carried out as many field trips to Kyoto and Aichi as we had planned in the past year. The trips were productive. We had great help from the JA representative as well as from the farmers in Kyoto prefecture and Aichi. We have been requested to return and stay longer in order to observe the daily life of the foreign workers. We are communicating with JA and with the Aichi farmers online. We have gained a good rapport with them. We presented preliminary results at NODE conference on migration, held with Waseda and U. Birmingham scholars, December 3-6, 2019. Our presentation was well received. We made collaborations with UK scholars for future research. The only problem was we could not present at the Association for Asian Studies in March due to Covid 19.We would like to make a follow-up trip to JA in Kyoto prefecture in July, if the Corona virus situation improves. Furthermore we will visit Aichi, to stay for a week or ten days' trip, in order to get to know the people there better, and find out to what extent the workers are being incorporated in local events. I will interview some of the local politicians, as well as Ministry of Agriculture staff, to understand their views on the SSWI program going forward. We will expand our contacts with farms who employ SSWI workers to have more of a variety of farms and stakeholders. I will be able to make more field trips in December 2020 as well as February 2021 if the virus situation has improved.<BR>I will apply again to attend the Association of Asian Studies meeting next year in the US in March 2021. With a world pandemic, it is difficult to predict to what extent we can carry out the field trips, or join the conferences. I may delay applying to present my findings at the American Anthropological Association conference in November 2020,depending on the pandemic. Instead I will attend the final year of the grant. I will keep up with the news and scholarly accounts on this

In order to understand the ongoing socioeconomic changes in Asian societies after the global financial crisis, we utilized cutting-edge perspectives from Feminist Economics to analyze globalization in the three spheres of finance, production, and reproduction.Comparative analyses on Japan/US were carried out on the topic of financial exclusion and inclusion,housing loans,consumer loans.Japan/Korea analyses were carried out on the topic of life insurance.Furthermore, we analyzed industries for the ageing society (wheelchairs, social insurance systems (care insurance), including interest groups and end-users, at the macro, meso and micro-levels

The objective of this research was to compare aspects of female migrant workers' employment and lifestyles in the coastal areas of China, under differing management regimes. In particular, the research took up three electronics firms in Guangdong Province, comparing and discussing the employment and conditions of female migrant workers, using data from our interviews and questionnaire surveys. We summarize our findings as follows :1. From the perspective of management, Firm A in Shenzhen exhibited a stable pattern of management with several Japanese features. They had created a system that enabled a stable procurement of middle managers and in-firm stratification. They had achieved a stable growth throughout the firm. Firm B's management pursued change. Relying increasingly on local labor for their resources, they employed a management style befitting the cultures and practices of the locality and achieved increased productivity from their female workers. Company C exhibited an extended expansion pattern and makes use of 'transnational' human resources, carrying out cost savings by making use of favorable tax policies through reliance on joint-venture production.2. In terms of employment, Firm A mainly utilized a three-shift system with daily work. Firms B and C employed two-shift systems with overtime. There was a median gap of 200 yuan in the pay, and wages were a significant factor in workers' job satisfaction insofar as the workers' ability could be demonstrated through the wage. Overtime encroached on the length of free time, and we could discern slight differences among firms vis a vis the acquisition of a new knowledge of leisure and the evaluation of the migrant worker lifestyle overall. In all, however, female migrant workers evaluated their experiences positively.3. When comparing these three firms in terms of gender and perceptions of inequality between men and women, there were significant differences between Firm B and the other two firms as regards pay and bonus, but on other aspects, we could not necessarily see a significant difference. However, in Firm A where we could directly compare male and female workers, there was a significant difference in type of occupation, of which we could say in itself demonstrated a division of labor by sex

This research is a comparative gender analysis of the United Kingdom, Germany, United State and Japan regarding the changes in industrial and work organization which would have been produced as "New Economy" in an era of economic globalization. It is pointed out that although many have argued about "less hierarchical" and "more flexible" way of organization in industry and work, in fact various social gaps based on gender, class, ethnicity and knowledge have been expanding. Not only the elements of deregulation and privatization but also the elements of re-regulation and strengthening safety net should not be overlooked, in relation to a vector of the current reformation of regulation and welfare states, and these phenomena intersect gender relations. Above four countries have strong economic power in the world and make implicationally an excellent contrast each other. These four countries have different gender regimes in particular. The United States is most advanced in promoting women's working. Japan's gender regime seems that woman's domestic roles are the highest priority. This research has investigated and made clear whether gender regimes cross cutting welfare, industry and working and family have been converging or whether it has been diverging under a strong path dependency.Namely the public symposium "New Economy in a Global Era : Comparative Gender Analysis of US, Europe and Japan" was held at University of Tokyo on September 3, 2002 to exchange opinions regarding the concepts of this research with scholars as well as citizens outside of the research group. The results of the symposium were published in the special issue "Transnational Feminism" in "Gendai Sisou" Vol.31 No.1 (January 2003). Workshops with overseas co-investigators were held in the University of Bremen at the end of September, 2003 and in Japan at the beginning of March,2004. In order to widely disseminate the results of this research to the society, the public symposium "New Economy in a Global Era : Comparative Gender Analysis of US, Europe and Japan II" (the 18th UT-ISS Symposium) at the University of Tokyo on March 4, 200

This research concerns how middle-class families in Paris and Tokyo balance their working lives and their family lives in contemporary society.&nbsp; While the societies are quite different in many respects, they also have points in common--they are both post-modern democracies, both have high rates of education for women and a substantial presence of women in employment, and both experienced demographic decline in more recent years.&nbsp; France, however, though government policy that emphasizes thick support for families, has managed to stave the sharp decline in the birth rate, while Japan has not taken this route and is still confronted with a very low birthrate.&nbsp; Our research, is an anthropological study, based on narrative in-depth interviews of middle and upper-middle class working men and women in Paris and Tokyo.&nbsp; It asks these families how they manage their everyday schedules, who takes care of the family, how their relatives and partners are involved, what sorts of services they use from the government and their satisfaction with that, and their conception of the family and the couple, and their hopes for their futures.&nbsp; We are currently writing an academic paper based on our analysis from these cases.

This research involved directly contacting the stakeholders in the system of Technical Interns and Trainees in the area of farming, and hearing from them how they manage the current system and how they envision the new system of tokutei ginou&nbsp; as it comes into place in the next years.We studied Aichi and Kyoto prefectures, because they are two of the prefectures that exhibited a great deal of interest in utilizing new systems of labor to support agricultural innovation.&nbsp; We are interested in how foreign labor has been utilized up until now, and how they will be incorporated into the local societies in the future. Hence, social inclusion is a key word of this project.&nbsp;&nbsp;With the assistance of an RA, I was able to make three trips to Kyoto and Nagoya in order to assess the current situation.&nbsp; We interviewed JA officials in Nagoya City, Kyoto, as well as a local JA office, and we also interviewed one official at the Kyoto Prefectural Agricultural office. We participated in a farmers' meeting in one local area, and on a separate occasion, visited several farms there and spoke with the owners about their operations.We also spoke with some of the Technical Interns and Trainees, and saw the lodgings of some of them. Furthermore, we were able to do participant observation at a weekly meeting of one of the Japanese language learning workshops, held in that locale in the evening.&nbsp;

This research project seeks to understand familyorganization and social change in the 21st century, especially inregard to work/life balance, gender roles, and caregiving.&nbsp; With this fund from Waseda University in2018, with the collaboration of Professor Hiroko Umegaki-Costantini who alsosecured research funds from her university, Sciences-Po, I was able to make substantialprogress on the research.&nbsp; The Frenchside of the research ended in May last year when we completed 30 researchinterviews with men and women who had at least one child under the age of 18. &nbsp;&nbsp;Dr.Umegaki-Costantini of Sciences-Po and I wrote a preliminary researchpresentation based on our study, presenting it at the Historical Demographyseminar of Professor Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux of the EHESS, in May 2018. Preliminary findings indicate that although the French have more social supports for work/life balance, it remains a problem in their family lives.&nbsp;&nbsp;We received excellent feedback whichencouraged us to look further into social class aspects of work/life balanceand care. Hence I plan to take another trip to Paris in the next phase of thisresearch in order to interview people of more varied socio-economicbackgrounds. I also presented this research to the faculty of GSAPS when Ireturned from my sabbatical leave in September, 2018.

The Special Project research grant for 2017 allowed me to re-interview the women in my Salarywomen dataset and to have those interviews professionally transcribed. Although the fund was insufficient to transcribe all of the interviews, I will be able to use my personal research funds to finish the remaining transcriptions in April of 2018. This will be in time for the remainder of my sabbatical leave, which I will spend at the East-West Center and the University of Hawaii, in the summer months.&nbsp; There I will spend my time in analysis and writing up of this interview data.&nbsp;&nbsp;By way of preliminary results, what I can say I have found from this most recent set of interviews is interesting material on women's evolution of their self concept as they age. Some have taken on increased responsibilities as managers in their firms, while another has become a manager after a long wait and much perseverence.&nbsp; Children are growing up and moving on to senior high school and university; life projects such as rebuilding a house are achieved, parents age apace, while some have passed away.&nbsp; As well, my informants themselves are aging and sense their age. Their doctors warn them of gaining weight, and caution them to get more exercise, which many of them take to heart. At least two of my informants have lost a significant amount of weight and say that they feel much better.&nbsp;&nbsp;In addition, some of the women are now thinking about what to do in retirement, and are honing their outside interests, such as jazz piano or other arts, which they plan to continue when they retire.My current sabbatical leave allows me the time to analyze this data and to write about these women's lives. I am currently writing an article which looks at how women sustain marriage in middle-age whilst they continue with their fulltime, regular employment.

This project fund has allowed me to develop and pursue the French side of this research while I am resident in Paris during my sabbatical leave.&nbsp;&nbsp;The funds have paid for honorarium for interpreters to accompany myself and one other collaborative researcher as we interview French dual-earner families about their work/life balance and well-being, focusing on issues of the household division of labor, carework by and for the older generations, the social welfare network that supports work-life balance, the corporate or other work environment that supports or detracts from work/life balance, as well as couple's attitudes toward bearing and rearing children, and the meaning of family today.&nbsp;&nbsp;I first discussed with my collaborator, Dr. Hiroko Umegaki of Sciences Po in Paris, about her interest in carrying this out as a joint project. She has done a Ph.D. dissertation from Cambridge University on the role of grandparents in the family.&nbsp; Hence she was interested in pursuing especially the question of intergenerational care in families of dual earners in Paris. We began the project in December by finding the interpreters ard readying the resume and fiche in both languages for the interviews.&nbsp; We began the interviews in January 2018 and had finished 18 by the end of February. We are continuing the project until we reach thirty informants, but Dr. Umegaki's funds will cover the rest of the interviews.&nbsp;&nbsp;To date we have found that the French have far more flexibility in achieving work and life balance than their Japanese counterparts.This is not particularly surprising, given the high level of government support for childbearing and rearing, and the lower working hours.&nbsp; We find the range of how they think about family, and how women think about work and their own sense of liberation and independence, to be quite striking..&nbsp; It is too early to give definitive findings, but we will be doing fieldwork on the project until the end of April 2018 and expect to carry out analyes over the coming two years.