International Sociology and International Sociology Reviews

‘Fertility and population’ is our Topic of the Month for July 2024. On this topic, enjoy this month Free Access to this article by Mayumi Nakamura (University of Toyama, Japan) and Mito Akiyoshi (Senshu University, Japan) published in International Sociology, Affective aspects of parenthood and their intergenerational effects on fertility. Read on to know more about the authors’ trajectory and work.

Mayumi Nakamura

Mito Akiyoshi

Why are you working on this topic? Could you share an experience, a fact or a person who made you get engage on that research?

M Nakamura: An event that triggered me to notice the importance of this topic was a group interview by the Cabinet Office regarding the declining birthrate, which I participated in back in 2011. We interviewed groups of mothers and groups of fathers in Tokyo and Kumamoto and asked why they decided to have children. One mother seemed confused with the question and stuttered, “Since it is natural to have children once you get married.” I felt as if a hammer hit me. Trained at the University of Chicago, where Gary Becker’s rational choice paradigm prevailed, I took it for granted that we make our own choices. But she was not alone in this. In a survey of 20,000 parents we conducted after the interview, 70% of parents agreed with the passage, “It is natural to have children once you are married.” I realized there are two kinds of people: those who take it for granted to have a child once you are married and those who find it a matter of choice. I started to question what contributed to those differences.

Although this event made me realize the relevance of this topic, what drives me to work on it is, frankly, a sense of anger. I am angry with a society that still deprives women of satisfying career opportunities and where working women are still expected to leave jobs upon childbirth.

I am angry with a society that expects women to bear and raise children (as well as caring for elderly at home) with minimal institutional and economic support, just enough to carry on with the double shift of child care and outside work. We need to have more than that minimum support to enjoy motherhood. Women need more time for themselves, not just barely enough to carry on. I wanted society to realize this.

My relationship with my mother contributed to developing this topic (you may have guessed). She worked part-time at a job she did not like or was proud of. The double shift of working outside and at home made her exhausted. Moreover, being deprived of educational and career opportunities, she lived through me, which led her to be always frustrated with me since I was never good enough to satisfy the aspirations which she was prevented from achieving for herself. I was a good student, but nothing was good enough for her. What I saw was thus a very unhappy motherhood. I cannot innocently take it for granted that motherhood is lovely and full of joy since what I saw was agony.

M Akiyoshi: My latest article is about how fertility is influenced by mother-daughter relationships. It is one of a series of papers I’ve authored or co-authored on women’s life-cycle decisions in Japan, and how they play out in the context of a gender-stratified job market, rigid division of household labor, and broader cultural value systems. I find this topic compelling not only because East Asian women’s life choices are a largely untold sociological story: understanding the drivers of life course decisions can also have deep practical implications given the extremely low fertility rates in East Asia. Once we find the variables that suppress fertility, we can start conversations about what we want and how to get there. For example, do very low fertility societies wish to tackle sub-replacement level fertility or rather learn to live with it?

I came to focus on women’s choices almost by accident. I had heard anecdotes about how getting a PhD kills a woman’s value on the marriage market in societies with conservative value orientations, and that young women are increasingly reluctant to pursue both career and family in those settings. I knew also that some of my female students were denied job interviews solely because of their gender, and they are not imagining the reason: employers told them so to their face. These anecdotes, coming through day-to-day interactions, motivated my inquiry into issues such as fertility intentions as empirical examples of the dynamic and co-constructive interaction between social processes and individual life outcomes.

More broadly, I am interested in explaining individual choices in relation to a variety of opportunities and constraints. This theoretical interest runs through several topical strands. In addition to women’s life choices, I have looked at the social implications of technology – the variable diffusion of information platforms, community involvement in nuclear waste management, and most recently the implications of artificial intelligence in human-machine work groups.

Do you have any video, recorded conference, or online material that you would like us to share with others?

M Nakamura: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sT7NghWwNA [in Japanese]

M Akiyoshi: Website: https://sites.google.com/senshu-u.jp/mitoakiyoshi/bio

What would you emphasize about your academic trajectory? Can you highlight which have been your academic positions, universities, awards, departments and research centers please?

M Nakamura: My academic trajectory was not straightforward. I received my graduate training at the University of Chicago. I took a long time off, and it took me long years to finish. When I completed my PhD I was already 39, divorced, and working as a non-paying adjunct researcher. I changed from one adjunct position to another and finally found a tenured job at the University of Toyama when I was 42. I remarried in Toyama when I was 45.

My non-standard trajectory as a Japanese woman and a Japanese academic provided me with distinct interests and insights into marriage timing, declining birthrate, and gender stratification in career trajectory. I did research on gender stratification among Japanese professionals such as lawyers and medical doctors, which was under-researched in Japan at that time. I also did various studies on dating in Japan, which very few Japanese academics had previously focused on. Those studies showed that those who are economically disadvantaged not only postpone or give up marriage, but also are unable to find a date in the first place.

Also, living in Toyama provided me with non-standard viewpoints on marriage timing and declining birthrate. Much of the academic research on Japan focuses on Tokyo. What they describe as the characteristics of Japan are actually Tokyo’s characteristics. Toyama is located on the Japan Sea. Its culture differs from Tokyo’s. Its culture and fertility differ from that of a neighboring prefecture, Fukui, in the same regional block, though the differences between these prefectures are usually ignored by academics. By focusing on regional differences within the same regional block, I found factors that affect fertility differences across regions that also affect Tokyo.

In Toyama, I teach research methods and have done a wide range of surveys and interviews on regional revitalization (chihou sousei in Japanese) with my students. We have conducted surveys on the following issues: fertility in Toyama and Fukui; tourism in the Hokuriku Region, including the impact of extending the Hokuriku bullet train to the Hokuriku region and the impact of the COVID pandemic; citizens’ response to Toyama’s transportation policy; high-school students and university students intentions to move to large cities. Although these projects seem to be wide-ranging, they are all connected and provide me with an understanding of the area, which helps me understand the factors surrounding its declining birthrate.

My positions:
Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo
Post-doctoral Research Fellow at Ochanomizu University (COE program)
Assistant Professor at Ochanomizu University (CSD program)
Lecturer at the University of Toyama (Economics Department)
Associate Professor at the University of Toyama (Economics Department)
Professor at the University of Toyama (Economics Department)

M Akiyoshi: I typically work with survey data, using standard tools for categorical data such as logistic regression and Poisson regression, but I also use non-frequentist methods when it suits the problem at hand. With my graduate students, I have also dabbled in quantitative analysis of text data.

After college, I worked as a systems analyst in Tokyo. My task was to develop software to handle derivative transactions such as futures, swaps, and options. I had taken an introductory sociology class in college, which exposed me to Erving Goffman’s Gender Advertisements and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. These made such a strong impression that I kept reading sociology books on my daily commute. Eventually, I enrolled in a graduate program in sociology at a university in the Tokyo area, earned an MA and then decided to pursue a PhD at the University of Chicago. There I discovered the power of quantitative analysis and learned how to generate interesting theoretical questions. I was extremely fortunate as a student and feel grateful to my principal advisor, Professor Andrew Abbott, and other scholars, including Professors James Davis, Roger Gould, Saskia Sassen, and Kazuo Yamaguchi. Fellow students, including Fabio Rojas and Harris Kim, educated me as well. True to the Chicago tradition of interdisciplinarity, I now work regularly with scholars from neighboring fields. Bill Lawless, a mathematician and psychologist, has been a source of inspiration and we have collaborated on several papers and book chapters over the years. Gill Steel, a political scientist, helped me understand the intricate operation of power in Japanese social life.

My current position:
Professor, Dept. of Sociology, Senshu University, Kawasaki, Japan

Do you want to add any other information?

M Nakamura: I work on gender-related studies (family and the labor market), but I work on regional revitalization-related research in Hokuriku region with my students at the University of Toyama.

M Akiyoshi: I am open for collaborative work, including comparative research. I also serve as a chair on several dissertation committees. The door to my office is open, so to speak.