Beyond grass-eating men and meat-eating women

I've been doing some research on Japanese social trends, and came across a fascinating article that I thought was worth sharing. The piece, by the astute social commentator Maki Fukasawa (who coined the term "grass-eating men"), is in Japanese, so I will summarize it here.

Fukasawa's piece, part of a column she does for Nikkei BP's Associe, a smart Japanese website aimed at working women, is ostensibly about the gap in male and female views on marriage, but it covers a lot more territory that has relevance to anyone interested in the Japanese economy. (As an aside, why are so many women's sites in America so trivial and fluffy?)

It won't be surprising for anyone who has been to Japan and been served tea by a female secretary before meeting with a male executive that Japanese women earn, on average, just over half of what men make. What was new to me was that Japanese women's average income peaks in their early 30s at just under US$34,000, and falls for the rest of their lives. By their early 50s, women are earning just US$30,000. Japanese men, by contrast, see their income rise over the same period. Men's income peaks in their early 50s at more than twice what women the same age earn, at almost US$75,000. Unsurprisingly, women represent just 10 percent of Japanese managers, compared with more than 40 percent in the US, according to Fukasawa.

These data reflect the "M-pattern" of Japanese female workforce participation, which climbs in their 20s, falls in their 30s and picks up again in their 40s. Lest you think that this is changing, Fukasawa reminds us that the M-pattern has been in place, essentially unchanged, since the 1980s. While clearly women in many countries struggle to balance work and home life, Japanese women are handicapped in their advance in the workforce by local prejudices (many carried by women themselves) but also the ridiculous shortage of nursery school places. There are 20,000 children on waiting lists for day-care centers in Japan. Only 28.5 percent of women with children under three work; by the time these kids are 6, 48.2 percent of their mothers work.

And I'd be willing to bet that many of those women aren't working full time. Women, like young men, are much more likely to be on non-staff contracts. Women accounted for 30 percent of Japan's non-staff workforce in the 1980s. Today, they account for more than 50 percent. I suppose you could argue that this reflects a higher total workforce participation for women today.

Fukasawa argues that these data support why men and women in Japan are so far apart on marriage. Women, including the "meat-eating" hunter women Fukasawa talks about, are very keen to get married, but men are shying away from this rite of passage. (This might explain why 25 percent of first children in Japan are conceived out of wedlock, according to Japanese government data, and why wedding planners now cater to pregnant brides, something that would have been unheard of as a business model a decade ago.)

The problem isn't hidden, Fukasawa says. It's obvious. That's why women care so much more about marriage - it's their best shot at financial security. And it's why men, concerned about being laid off, are even more reluctant to get married, since that means supporting another person (and likely a child as well) economically for the rest of their lives.

Japan's herbivores

I'm interested in Japanese youth - particularly how they consume (see my Atlantic piece on that subject), but also how they think. The social changes in Japan are fascinating right now - young Japanese I talk to have a completely different approach to life than their parents. What kind of country does that create? Is it one where people are more free to pursue whatever lifestyle they want, where they feel less judged not following the traditional path of cram school-university-job-marriage-children-30 years of long hours-retirement? I'm also interested in how this generation is pursuing more inwardly-focused hobbies - a lot of online games, of course, but also Japanese traditional crafts, and domestic travel rather than the status-trip to Honolulu. One Japanese man told me that he and his friends have no interest in holding down regular jobs - their parents will support them, and any extra money they need they can earn easily, by working at convenience stores or in Japanese pubs. Another swathe of young Japanese earn their keep by selling manga to each other in Akihabara and elsewhere. Anyway, I've written a piece about part of this phenomenon for Slate here. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. (Image by Robert Neubecker courtesy of Slate.)

Consumer behavior

It's clear that people are a lot tighter with their money these days, but how will consumers spend once the economy recovers? It's a relevant question to all of us who care about the well-being of workers and the health of the environment. Grant McCracken has an interesting post on this on The Atlantic Monthly's website. He proposes a few scenarios, including one where we trade down on some things in order to trade up on others, and seems to come to the conclusion in the end that we should all be thinking more about the environment when we consume. The nightmare scenario he describes is Japan, where people become permanently miserly. Especially after my recent trips to Japan to write my Atlantic piece and on research trips, I take exception to this, as, I believe, would economist Jesper Koll. In comments that sadly didn't make it into the piece, Jesper argued to me that Japanese consumption has actually been stable as a portion of incomes, and that one big factor driving down Japanese consumption has been the end of the consumer finance industry at the government's behest. In discussion of consumers in Asia in particular, I think we should be all be looking a lot more closely at the spending patterns of different generations, particularly as countries like Japan are aging a lot faster than other countries.