The Political Economy of Japan's Low Fertility (review)

The Political Economy of Japan's Low Fertility is that most desirable sort of edited volume: a compact, tightly focused, and accessible collection of investigations into a problem that is compelling across a range of subject areas. This collection of chapters treats the multiple ways social and economic practices combine with government policies to make childbearing an unattractive option for many Japanese women, resulting in Japan's famously low fertility rate (1.25 children per woman in 2005, according to a statistic quoted in the first chapter [p. 4]). The chapters are written by political scientists, economists, and sociologists. The writers draw thoughtfully on available quantitative data, and they place their arguments carefully both within the relevant scholarly literature and in an explicitly comparative context. Even readers who are not Japan specialists will find much that is useful in these examinations of the various ways governments' distinct policy choices shape the environment in which women struggle to balance work and family. Readers who are not gender specialists may also be surprised by how the gender-conscious research showcased in this collection is helpful in revealing the more general tendencies of phenomena such as labor markets or education systems which are less frequently subjected to gender-conscious analysis than the low fertility rate.

Because of her self-conscious use of a comparative framework, editor Frances Rosenbluth's first chapter is one of the strongest of the book. Along with doing the usual work of summarizing the contributions made by other scholars whose work is featured in later chapters, Rosenbluth offers a cogent analysis of the different trends in scholarly literature seeking to explain declining birth rates in Europe and Japan. The chapter is simultaneously a primer on the state of the field and a persuasive justification for the book's uniting argument, which is, in Rosenbluth's words, the claim that "fertility tends to be depressed where vested interests impede female access to the workforce, and higher where easy labor market accessibility and childcare support make it easier for women to balance family and career" (p. 4).

The other chapters of the book take on pieces of the task of defending this conclusion. For example, chapters by Margarita Estévez-Abe, Mary C. Brinton, and Eiko Kenjoh all examine the ways Japan's labor market practices all too often force women to choose between working and having children. These chapters show how some elements of Japanese-style capitalism that were once praised—such as "lifetime" employment—have contributed to the bind in which young women find themselves. Using data that trace indicators of workers' commitments to firms, Estévez-Abe argues that economic systems such as those in Japan and Scandinavia where workers are expected to spend most of their careers in a single firm encourage workers to develop skills that are difficult to transfer to other firms while en-couraging employers to value workers who are likely to spend a long time at their firm making use of skills employers have spent resources to de-velop. Long-term employment models produce stability for male workers, but they penalize women, who are more likely to take time off from work for their families and who are, thus, less likely to find themselves hired by employers who prize long-term loyalty. Women who want to work in rewarding jobs might be reasonable in assuming that childbearing is incom-patible with employer expectations. With a provocative comparison to the Netherlands, Kenjoh suggests that one potential solution to the labor market rigidities that trouble women might be an improved range of part-time work options.

If Japanese firms were more willing to offer women a variety of employment models, women might find the choices between work and childbearing less stark, but as Brinton demonstrates in her comparison of the histories of the rise of female clerical workers in the United States and Japan, the reasons for the perpetuation of labor market...