Women's views of things:

Women's Attitudes

The fact that women face a lot of discrimination in the workplace along with intense pressure to get married would seem to lead one to think that the vast majority of women would resent being married as being what seems to be their only practical alternative.

However, there are some advantages women have in marriage. For one thing, they control the purse-strings. The men come home and mostly turn their paycheck over to their wives who will then handle the bills and even allot their husbands an allowance. They are also the ones who make most of the decisions about the home, and so this can actually end up giving women a sense of pride and power in being a housewife.

"The role of the woman in the home is valued and her self-esteem is high because the management of the family has always been considered central to stability and prosperity in Japanese society. Contrary to the image of subjugation outsiders seem to associate with Japanese women, the latter often believe it is they who draw the boundaries within which their husb0ands move, not the other way around." The Japanese Woman: Traditional Image and Changing Reality, 1993

This even ties in to cultural traits. The same source notes:

"Women are the intellectual and artistic upstarts of society today, exploring new endeavors and expressive their raw energies in diverse forms, while men remain largely confined to the old established norms and codes of traditional hierarchical society."

Women and Housework

One other interesting statistic relates to how many hours a day Japanese women spend doing housework. In 1959 this was some 7 hours and 22 minutes daily; by 1979 the figure had fallen to 6 hours and 14 minutes and it fell further in 1989 to 5 hours and 55 minutes per day.

A Home and Children

An interesting statistic (From Japan in the 21st Century) is that as of 1996 37% of Japanese women still believe that a home and children were what women really wanted. By comparison, only 7% of American women agreed. This is especially interesting, though, in that the birth rate in Japan has fallen below 2.0, in some places as low as 1.2, so this view of how good it is to stay home and have children doesn't seem to be backed up by the birth rate numbers.

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