Results of the research ; (1)Feminist economics materialized as a new field of economics, the Sphere of Reproduction as economic categories was visualized.(2)It focused on social reproduction and the economic theory basis of the action by commitment which is not only a selfish individual's rationality was clarified.(3)There is the purposeful rationality to the circulation of the basic needs of life time, and the interdependency of caring has included in the economy. That is the alternative conceptualization of the economy by which the most foundational result of feminist economics. The above three points are having verified theoretically

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  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.  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.  With the assistance of an RA, I was able to make three trips to Kyoto and Nagoya in order to assess the current situation.  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. 

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.  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.  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.  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.  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.  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.  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..  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.

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.  There I will spend my time in analysis and writing up of this interview data.  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.  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.  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.  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 was the final year of my research project on salarywomen, until the next time I perform the longitudinal interviews on this data set of 15 married women with children, who have been working continuously at Naruse Corporation since they began their employment after finishing their final year of education.In this set of interviews, I concentrated on asking these women about their promotions and their attitudes toward promotion.  I did this because I wanted to understand how they are situated in regard to Prime Minister Abe's efforts to increase the numbers of women promoted to management in corporations. All of the women in my data set are now in their forties at the youngest, so all of them have spent many years in their firm. Hence one would expect that they have all been promoted by now.  Yet this turned out not to be the case.  While some have been promoted, others remained behind.  Why?The answer is complex, but it is rooted in the difficulties of being the primary caretakers of children while holding down a career job.  While there was one employee who had become a manager at a relatively early age, she was able to do so because her own mother took on a large share of the care work at home.  Other women also became managers, but this tended to happen after their forties, when the children were at least junior high or high-school age, and no longer needed as much attention from their mothers.  While promotions were rewarding for these women, they also entailed new responsibilities and hence, more workload.  Although salaries did not increase much from promotions, they noted that their pensions would increase significantly.  The women who did not yet have promotions could be divided into three groups--those who wanted promotion yet were thwarted, those who were conflicted about it, and those who did not desire a promotion.  In a paper I wrote on this, I discuss three of the women who exemplify these three typologies.The person who wanted the promotion yet who could not have it yet was an interesting case, as she had taken advantage of the company's generous system for childcare leave, as well as accompanying her spouse at the time of his transfer to the US.  When she returned to her position, she was unable to be promoted, even though she felt she had worked hard and deserved it.  Instead, the firm offered her extra educational courses. She appreciated this, but she really wanted to be promoted.  From her example we learn of the problems women can face if they actually make use of the flexible family friendly policies that firms offer.The person who was conflicted still had three small children and a husband who worked very long hours. She loved her job, but she also wanted to spend time with her children. She knew that if she were promoted, she would not be able to spend the time with them that she wanted to spend. Even with her current job, she was unable to spend enough quality time with them. She even developed depressive symptoms twice because of the time dilemmas she faced.  She was hoping that her husband would be sent abroad, so that she could take a leave to accompany of him and be released from the time crunch she was experiencing at Naruse.The person who did not want promotion was too busy with her children, always put them first, and was adament that that was her priority.  She liked her job and she was a very good worker, but for her, foremost came her family.  We can learn from this that many women will not desire promotion until corporations provide more reasonable hours of work, for both men and women.I presented the paper at the Asian Studies conference in Paris in September 2015. I will further rework the paper and hope to send it out for publication in the coming months.I am grateful to this grant for the opportunity to continue work on my salary women data set.

In 2014 I finished the interviews of salarywomen at Naruse company (pseudonym), and had all of the interview data transcribed.  The next goal will be analysis and writing up of this project.Across eleven years of engagement with these salarywomen, I have observed many interesting developments in their lives as workers and as wives and mothers.  All of the women I interviewed seem determined to stay employed at the firm, if they have not already left. .Some women and their husbands have placed their children into private junior or senior high schools, and some children are also now enrolled in university, or graduated and trying to find their way in the difficult job market.  Some of my respondents are actively trying to have their children become internationally savvy. They are having them learn English, or enrolling them in summer homestay programs. My oldest respondent has also had one of her children marry recently, to a man with a foreign ethnic background--another harbinger of a more multiethnic, cosmopolitan Japan. Children's illnesses have also been encountered. One woman has had to ask the firm for flexibility in regard to her schedule as one of her children now has a serious chronic illness.Another major foci of this round of interviews was intimacy with marital partners.  I have found that most of the women in my data set, who are in the prime years of their lives,  no longer have nor desire intimate relations with their spouses. I need to read further in the literature to make sense of this finding.   I also looked into attitudes toward promotion. Most women do not desire promotion until their children are grown, as they wish to concentrate on rearing them rather than to put in late hours and weekends at the firm.  This suggests that Prime Minister's 'womenomics' strategy may have difficulties being implemented if firms do not change their practices of overtime and long hours.

In the summer of 2013 I was able to contact the Naruse Corporation (pseudonym) and ask for permission to begin this next rendition of the qualitative project on salarywomen that I have been carrying out periodically since 2003. The company response was favorable, and they noted that from now on, they gave me permission to contact the women in my data set whenever I like, directly, without having to go through the personnel department, since this is a well-established project and they understand I am careful with my informants' privacy concerns. By the time I received their reply, however, it was too late to begin interviews, so I had to wait until the fall semester. I was able to contact and hold interviews with nine of the women in my data set before March 5,2014, by which time the research fund had to be used up. These interviews have now all been transcribed by a professional transcription company, and I will perform the analysis this summer, after I have finished interviews with the remaining five women, whom I plan to meet by the middle of July. There have been important changes in the lives of these women since I last spoke with them. We had in-depth conversations about their ideas on their careers and difficulties and challenges with work, their ideas about promotion, their ideas about retirement and possible other activities they would like to pursue, issues with caring for aging family members, intimacy with their partners, plans for their children (school entrance and graduation, upcoming marriage, etc), and discussions about how they spend their private time. It has been very rewarding to meet and have these conversations again, and I look forward to the analysis stage of this study. Aside from the interviews and transcriptions, the research fund also partially supported my travel to the Association for Asian Studies Conference in Philadelphia, March 26-29, 2014, where I Chaired a panel on the last day, about career women in East Asia. The panel was well attended and the exchange of information stimulating.

Thank to the funding provided from the Special Projects Research Fund, I was able to have ten interview tapes from this project transcribed by a student assistant. It took the student assistant longer than planned to finish transcribing the tapes, so analysis is not yet final. But I can tentatively say I found the interviews highly interesting. I came away from these interviews with a strong notion of the difficulties women face when once they leave their regular employment to marry or give birth. Several women mentioned to me that they would not have quit their first jobs had they known how difficult it would be to find another well-paying job in the future. Yet they could not see how they could possibly balance the long hours and fast pace of their jobs with lives as wives and mothers, so they quit. These interviewees were uniformly well-educated and some were in upper-middle income brackets. Nevertheless, the women interviewed strongly desired to become re-employed, even at part-time menial jobs because they wanted to be out in and contributing to society, and staying home with the children was not sufficiently fulfilling. In fact, two of the women I interviewed had at periods engaged as salespeople of yogurt drinks and put their infants in public daycare to do so, despite high household income. Their husbands were somewhat supportive of their desire to work, although they also worried about how this might affect the children. Most of the men did little of the childcare or household chores during the week, as their long hours on the job prohibited it, but they did quite a lot of weekend family work. The men I spoke with noted they had no objections to their wives taking on equal financial responsibility for the household, but it was unrealistic to expect this since they had already quit their first jobs, and the husband himself could make a much higher income than the wife could ever hope to earn. They felt constrained against putting more time in on household work because their jobs were so demanding of them. One woman noted her husband did not like taking care of his children and was adept at it, but she insisted on it and after time passed, he become much better at handling them. In other words, parenting is learned, not innate. Both men and women looked to the government to provide decent daycare for children and after-school care as well as community programs for children too old for after-school care but not fully self-sufficient. Re-employment and training programs sponsored by the government were also looked upon favorably. I noted in my proposal I would attend the conference "Work and Family: Today's Realities and Tomorrow's Visions" sponsored by Wellesley College and the Sloan Foundation, and I did. I learned a great deal about how corporations in the United States are creating work/life policies to help their employees integrate their working and personal lives. Such policies include flex-time, telecommuting, reduced hours for regular staff, leaves of absence, compressed work week, various kinds of family leave, job sharing, and child/eldercare referral or assistance. Researchers have found that the biggest problems in implementation of these policies center around work culture where middle managers want workers to be present, and "face-time" is more important than actual productivity. Another problem is that these policies tend to be understood as policies for women, who have the responsibility for household and children. Men are discouraged from making use of them. This further entrenches the gendered division of labor in the United States. I came away from the conference wondering if work/life policies would have helped Japanese women to remain at their career jobs rather than quit and have to deal with the difficulties of the re-employment market.Results After the conference, I visited the headquarters of an American multi-national financial services firm that has branches in Japan. This firm is currently implementing work/life policies in its Japanese branches. I obtained permission to study this process and I have also applied to the Citibank Behavioral Sciences Research Council for funding to carry out the pilot project. I will hear in June whether or not I have been successful in this competition. In March I travelled to Purdue University in Indiana to begin working on a paper with a colleage there who is in Political Science and Women's Studies. She and I collaborated last summer in looking at some day-care initiatives of the Angel Plan, and I am using some of the material from the Special Projects research. The co-authored paper concerns changing notions of gender in Japan and the US, with reference to government policy on family leave and childcare. We will submit this paper to the Social Science Japan Journal of the University of Tokyo later this year. Last, in January 1999 I gave a talk at Meiji Gakuin University about the Wellesley conference and how I see it fitting into the situation in Japanese workplaces. I remain committed to this line of research inquiry, and plan to continue it.