Tough Choices: Bearing an Illegitimate Child in Japan (review)

Ekaterina Hertog's Tough Choices: Bearing an Illegitimate Child in Japan is a poignant observation of the contemporary configuration of the Japanese family institution from the perspective of the women at its margins. At the book's focal point are Japanese women, portrayed within their sociocultural circumstances, who mother children out of wedlock.

The book makes an important contribution to the many historical,¹ sociological, and anthropological explorations of the Japanese family and gender system² and of the contemporary Japanese politics of reproduction.³ The literature of the last four decades has illuminated the sociopolitical and economic circumstances of the nuclear Japanese family and the multiple rationales of its gendered division of labor. Attention is increasingly drawn to various family situations far removed from the state-supported ideal model of family and to the price paid by family members, especially women, in the effort to sustain the family.⁴ Tough Choices contributes by highlighting what is at stake in the family system for mothers who have not attained the ideal of the family, even temporarily.

The rate of single-parent households is rising in Japanese society, but most of those single parents are divorced women. The number of children born out of wedlock has remained unchanged and marginal for the last 50 years, unlike the case in other industrialized societies. The book persistently asks why bearing children out of wedlock remains such an unappealing and unconventional choice in contemporary Japan. This is so despite certain improvements in the social conditions of mothering, including single mothering, and despite the enhanced visibility of single-mother households in Japanese society; evidence is also accumulating on the problematic aspects of the Japanese family model.

To find out why marriage is considered absolutely necessary for childbearing, each chapter, as in a detective story, examines one arena of interconnected social discourse and practice (the labor market, the legal system, cultural perceptions of mothering and child well-being) for possible explanations. But this course only serves to deepen the mystery. Even professional women who earned enough to provide their children with the best economic conditions yearned to marry the fathers of their children even if the marriage would not last long.

This fresh and compelling look from the margins of the Japanese family is testimony to the persistent dominance in Japanese society of the model of childbearing within marriage. The family, as it emerges from Hertog's study, no longer signals a long-term mode of living to be realized by women against all odds. Yet marriage retains its almost unquestioned status as a precondition for childbearing: for mothers of children it still designates an essential life station that a woman may not miss, even if she stops only for a short while. For the striking majority of the unwed mothers to whom the author spoke, "the option of taking action, getting pregnant and bearing a child out of wedlock was simply not on their mental map" (p. 45) even when their biological clocks were running out.

Very few of the unwed mothers who were interviewed attacked the family institution head on. Though their choices were considered highly unconventional by themselves, their supporters, colleagues, and society at large, the majority of these women subscribed to the most conventional conceptions of family. They explained that they had planned to get married but it didn't work out through no fault of their own. Others felt this was their last chance to bear a child and made sure to normalize their decision by affirming that it was women's destiny to bear children.

A minority of women actively planned to bear a child out of wedlock. They said they had been traumatized by their parents' marriage experience. Another minority group was radical feminists who denounced the family system supported and promoted by the state. They were surrounded by a network of women who shared their worldview and lent them meaningful ideological, emotional, and practical support.

The author thus...