Robert Marshall: How did you decide to study Japanese matchmakers? What is the origin story of this research project?
Erika Alpert: For many understandable reasons, most studies of gender—and by extension, gender and language—have historically focused on groups left out of most scholarship because they didn’t represent a supposedly normal human experience. This group includes basically everyone who isn’t a cisgender man: women, trans people, nonbinary people, and gender-nonconforming people, with most studies focused on women’s language. This is well-needed reparative work, but I think this focus on marginalized experiences also reifies the idea that gender is something that women (and other gender minorities) have, something irrelevant to men, who remain the unmarked category.
So my own goal, taking inspiration from scholars like Cindi SturtzSreetharan and Scott Kiesling, was to contribute to studies of putatively normal gender and sexuality. I think we all benefit from reminders that heterosexual, monogamous marriage constructed along more or less normative gendered lines is as artificial (that is, based on human art and artifice), invented, and specific to its historical moment as any other social institution. I also think that these kinds of studies do good work by showing how normative categories that seem monolithic are actually nuanced, complicated, and manifest differently in different situations too. (Here I’m thinking particularly of SturtzSreetharan’s work on gentlemanly masculinity in Japan.)
There were some twists and turns along the way to studying matchmakers specifically , but I think matchmakers are uniquely suited to help us understand the social construction of normative marriage, because helping put together normative marriages is literally the job description. This is true in Japan, and doubtless even more true elsewhere, where matchmaking is a more widespread phenomenon. And, from a purely practical perspective, studying the work and worldviews of matchmakers provides a fairly nonintrusive site for looking at these issues. I initially wanted to study romance, because I thought this would be a situation where gender differences would be really foregrounded, perhaps eroticized, hyper-salient, but also couldn’t think of how I’d actually observe that.
But perhaps most truthfully and most importantly, I got very lucky and stumbled into a group of chatty and welcoming people. An adjective that I’ve often used to describe Japanese matchmakers is evangelical, and I mean that very literally having good news that they want to tell you about. Matchmakers want to share their beliefs that marriage is good for people, that it helps them live more stable, supported, and therefore happy lives, and that anyone can get married with the right approach and mindset. It’s a social job that’s all about explaining what they do to clients, and why it’s great and they should try it.
Robert Marshall: Why do you think the standard model of family and the gender roles played out in Japanese family life are so deeply embedded and hard to dislodge in Japan?
Erika Alpert: I don’t know that these ideas are harder to dislodge in Japan than elsewhere, to start, and I’d be reluctant to make that claim. For example, at this point, Japan has much better labor protections for mothers, at least in law, than the US does (like paid childcare leave for the first year of a child’s life). But I do think that the social trajectory of trying to dislodge them, for a variety of cultural reasons, has taken a very different path in Japan than elsewhere.
For example, it’s tempting to talk about the way norms of motherhood seem particularly entrenched in Japan. We can point at Japan’s low rates of extramarital childbearing, the high numbers of women who quit work in anticipation of childbearing, and the effects of maternity on women’s job prospects and career trajectories as concrete evidence of that. That’s very real. It’s harder to have kids in Japan without rearranging the rest of your life into an appropriate maternal situation. But I also think there’s a very real tendency to portray Japan (and other Asian countries with similar issues, like South Korea) as uniquely traditional in contradistinction to Western countries, or perhaps worse, as uniquely misogynist. I tend to think that this is not the case, but rather, that patriarchy comes in a Skittles rainbow of different flavors everywhere that are not necessarily more or less. So even as I want to highlight that norms of motherhood are particularly weighted in Japan in ways that absolutely influence career choices and family formation of all kinds, and that also feel terribly oppressive to people of all genders, I also think it’s useful to keep in mind things like research about women’s employment in North America and Europe duríng COVID-19 lockdowns. Pandemic unemployment has uniquely affected mothers, who left the workforce much more frequently than fathers, because women often have more precarious jobs or lower-earning jobs that are easier to sacrifice, and women were expected to step into the gap left by closed schools and childcare facilities.
So, having said all that, with all due caution, I think we can say that women in Japan are profoundly affected by ideals of motherhood in particular, because childbearing and parenting outside of the heterosexual nuclear family model are so rarely undertaken and so poorly supported by Japanese society in both social ways (stigma) and institutional ways. As an example of the latter, Japanese bureaucratic norms that date back fully 1500 years embed individual legal existence in the family registry (koseki) system that makes children’s legitimacy readily socially and legally visible to others by means of whether they’re in their mother’s or father’s registries, rather than using documents like birth certificates that identify parents with reference to the child. In the context of North America and Western Europe, the response to illegitimacy has largely been to fight the stigma. In northeast Asia, I think it’s much more normative to simply avoid marriage and childbearing entirely, so that no one faces the stigma or burden of trying to do things differently. Choosing not to have children is a bit scandalous and incomprehensible in the US context (although I think this is changing), but sort of receives a sensible nod in the Japanese one. Of course one simply opts out of the whole affair if one can’t commit wholeheartedly to the roles of mother and wife (consider also the 4B movement in South Korea).
Leonard Schoppa has noted that Japanese women’s exit from traditional family formation in some ways exacerbates the problem of rigid gender roles because opting out solves these issues on an individual level, but prevents women from organizing collectively for better conditions for mothers, as they have done elsewhere. This reminds me of Erving Goffman’s discussion of “the arrangement between the sexes.” According to Goffman, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, and racial minorities tend to be segregated into their own communities and can build solidarity and organize movements. By contrast, women are kept apart from each other by the structure of nuclear family households, and convinced to align their interests with their families instead of their fellow women or other gender minorities. Women are thus uniquely hampered in their attempts to collectively agitate for a different arrangement. So women who have opted for motherhood in Japan have often gone all-in (although working mothers of young children are on the rise). The women who are unprepared to do that have fully opted out. In many other contexts (I’m most familiar with the US and with Kazakhstan, apart from Japan), discussions of family problems or boosting birth rates focus on convincing people to have more children, to have more legally/religiously solemnized marriages instead of casual cohabitation, or to divorce with less frequency or haste. But rates of all of these phenomena are lower in Japan, and rates of singleness are higher—I think this also, over time, has produced this tremendous hurdle to jump, of convincing people to participate in the whole edifice of partnership and procreation in the first place, rather than to do it more or less or differently.
This answer has turned out to be tremendously long, but regretfully, I don’t know a shorter way to say these things! And I want to end by returning to the family registry system I mentioned above. This system has been in place roughly from the time of the Taika reforms circa 645 CE, when documenting families as patriarchal households was imported from China (along with a host of other bureaucratic and governmental changes). It was invested and reinvested with the full might of modern bureaucracy as Japan’s legal system was reformed first in the late 1800s, and again after WWII. Activists of all stripes have pointed to its many problems over the years, including the way it forbids married couples from bearing different surnames, a prohibition that has been upheld by Japanese courts both repeatedly and recently. It discriminates against international marriages, which have to be handled differently because those without Japanese citizenship have no family registries, and marriage is legally a process of moving one spouse into the other’s registry. Ironically, marrying a foreigner is the one way for women to retain their birth names after marriage, which I only found out from a friend’s announcement about her own marriage and name! And because of how marriage is handled by the family registries, as I noted earlier, the marital status of a child’s parents becomes completely transparent in a way that is not true of other record-keeping systems which might require, at a minimum, some cross-referencing of documents to facilitate discrimination. And yet, because it would require not just a legal overhaul, but a massive overhaul to any number of bureaucratic processes, new paperwork for everyone, and on and on, getting rid of the family registry system is more or less unthinkable (although activists and lawyers are, of course, thinking about it). But I would be remiss if I didn’t note that some of the reasons for the persistence of these problems is rooted not just in ideas about gender but in tremendously old ideas about what creates legal and social personhood, and how that personhood ought to be evidenced to others for any number of mundane purposes.
Robert Marshall: What do you think Japanese women and men hope to gain or accomplish or enjoy through marriage? Is it just that marriage promises to provide 1.5 children per couple? What is not available to them in some other way? Why are they are willing to turn to professional services to help them in this area?
Erika Alpert: Japan is an interesting case study for matchmaking as a more general practice, because first of all, brokered marriages only seem to have been widely popular throughout all social classes in Japan for a brief historical moment from the late nineteenth century through the middle of the twentienth, and then subsequently they fade away rather dramatically. At the same time, using a matchmaker to find a spouse lingers on as an option that’s available to anyone. This is in sharp contrast to, say, South Asia, where matchmaking has long been a mass practice that continues to be vibrant and meaningful in the present (although certainly not static or unchanging). It also stands in contrast to the individualist West (such as it is), where matchmaking occasionally occurs informally in ways that we understand to be minimally officious like being set up on a blind date), or is the suspiciously-regarded province of ethnic minorities. (I’m pretty sure I first learned about matchmaking from Fiddler on the Roof, and the Orthodox Jewish shidduch still thrives.) All of this is to say that we can’t talk about matchmaking in Japan without stressing on the one hand that is is very much a minority practice, but that it also has the fine patina of tradition attached. Only about 5-6% of all marriages in the present day involve some form of “matchmaking,” although that percentage actually increased quite a bit during COVID lockdowns. The Japanese word for this is omiai, referring to a formal introduction of two potential spouses from which marriage discussions then spin out.
Why do people engage in it? Well, I think my previous answer is partly relevant here. It’s incredibly difficult to have children while unmarried in Japan. It’s not so much that marriage promises children as that it’s the required first step for people who want to have them. But above and beyond this, Japanese matchmakers stress the social insurance provided by marriage when delivering the good news. In a way, it’s classic alliance theory. When you get married, you acquire people committed to taking care of you, even as you promise to take care of them—not just your spouse. You gain a network of expanded kin ties to sustain you through the vicissitudes of life. And for those who do have children, they also (in theory) gain the support of those children through their old age. In the classic words of The Legend of Zelda, it’s dangerous to go alone—take this (a spouse).
Of course, simply wanting a partner for companionship and social insurance doesn’t necessarily mean that someone will turn to matchmaking, but the advantage of matchmaking is that it’s a clearly defined process with clear aims. Japanese matchmakers like to talk about the ambiguity and uncertainty of dating, where there’s often not a clear trajectory to even good relationships. They especially highlight the vagaries meeting partners online, where app users have absolutely no idea, while browsing profiles, whether the other people are looking for the same thing or, in fact, if they are remotely who they purport to be. The pricing and structure of professional matchmaking is designed to discourage the unserious, because the fees can be quite high (hundreds of thousands of yen in a single payment for an engagement). The experienced human mediation of a matchmaker (as opposed to that of a friend or an app) is also meant to discern and guarantee the emotional, financial, social and other quality of potential matches. As I discuss in the book, I do think matchmaking is converging with other forms of mediated partner-searching, and that’s only to be expected as a normal change. Matchmaking in India has gone online too. But some of my interviewees on the client side of things absolutely felt that they met more serious partners via marriage bureaus as opposed to dating apps. Matchmakers, of course, insist on this distinction as an important marketing point.
Robert Marshall: You write that Japan has a long-standing birth and marriage rate crisis. Do you see any way out of it, or will Japan’s population gradually dwindle to zero? The conventional view, that the refusal of people to take up expected gender roles is responsible for the national crisis of decreasing population, lays public blame on individuals. Do you see any alternative to this view?
Erika Alpert: So let me start with the second part of the question. This is a classic critical theoretical point and paradox, isn’t it? In order to solve these problems, we have to look at structures, not people, although it is people and their individual decisions who in many ways act to recreate and reify the structures that constrain them. In any given social context, you have people making what they believe to be sensible decisions for them, given who they are, what they personally want, and what seems socially and materially possible for them. So in Japan, as I discussed, people who don’t think they can live up to the demands of parenthood might choose not to have children, and they might also choose to remain single so that there will be less pressure on them. When women get pregnant in Japan, many of them will leave their jobs, in part because that’s what’s expected of them, but also because Japanese society is in large part structured around the idea that mothers will be at home to provide childcare, and so other institutions around them, even ones that provide childcare, like preschools and kindergartens, become tremendously inconvenient without a caregiver at home to pick them up after a partial day of school. But then, of course, these sensible choices on an individual level tend to reify the profoundly imperfect realities that brought about those choices in the first place. As was true for US women during COVID lockdowns, so too women in Japan often quit their jobs because they make less money and so their jobs are more easily sacrificed for the benefit of the household. Then employers continue to justify sexist wages on the grounds that women are unreliable employees. Then women quit their jobs because they’re paid less, and the vicious cycle continues. I don’t think that we can or should blame any individual person for trying to make the best choices for them to survive. What we have to do is change the structures that lead to those choices in the first place, because no one person can do it alone.
We know that people will make different choices about family formation when we make changes to the incentive structures of various institutions. In the 2000s, a legal change made divorced women eligible to receive part of their (ex-)husband’s pensions, and for this among other reasons, divorce rates went up. Women had clearly been staying in unhappy or unsatisfying relationships because they had not worked much outside their homes, and so didn’t have pensions of their own. When they didn’t need the money any more, because they were recognized as having contributed invisibly to their husbands’ pensions, many felt much more free to divorce. I don’t want to say that this is necessarily a good or a bad change, but rather, clear evidence that structural changes work.
Knowing this, we can ask other questions about potential structural changes. For example, what might it look like if paid parental leave was not just made available but mandated for people of all genders? We know that taking parental leave tarnishes the image of employees who become mothers, in ways that affect how HR think of these employees and their commitments going forward. But sociologist Mary Brinton, in a talk, said that Japanese women she talked with about these issues deeply wished for mandated parental leave because that might be the only way men would ever take it. And if everyone had this time off, new mothers wouldn’t be notable for taking parental leave. So how might this reconfigure childcare arrangements? Or work-life balance for new parents? Or the career consequences of taking parental leave? One question that I ask in my book is very basic: what if wages were raised? What if paying for childcare or supporting children wasn’t a worry, because people knew they’d have enough money? What if men weren’t so concerned about the necessity of demonstrating their masculinity via their abilities to support a family financially, because they simply would have enough money? What if women weren’t worried about emasculating husbands by making more, because everyone would be making more, and spousal dependence on each other for income would be less pronounced?
Mainly, I think there are many things that can be done to raise birthrates, to make it easier to be a mother and other things also, or to be an engaged father. The urge for dramatic storytelling perhaps encourages journalists, social scientists, and politicians alike to paint a picture of the annihilation of human life and Japanese culture. I also don’t think it’s likely to happen—not in Japan, and not in any other country facing these demographic issues (which is basically all of them, to greater or lesser degrees). If nothing else, at some point the incentives in favor of liberalizing immigration law are going to outweigh the fears. While Japan has been painting a very quaint and isolated picture of itself for the last however-many decades, Japan has also, in its history, believed that Japanese culture and language should and could be learned by ethnic outsiders. Of course, the last time this happened, it was because Japan was engaging in an active imperial project throughout the Pacific, which no one should try to repeat. But there’s no reason to think that this belief couldn’t take root again under less violent circumstances, in the process of welcoming immigrants. The continuity of Japan does not depend on specific people reproducing that culture by teaching it to their biological children.
Robert Marshall: Goldstein-Godni has an article in Current Anthropology that just came out about a still admittedly marginal movement of men who call themselves sengyō shufu, but change the character fu to that of the character for husband, to emphasize their positive and pro-active dedication to the role of househusband. If such a movement were to grow strong, what sort of difference might it make to the marriage crisis in Japan, if any?
Erika Alpert: I address this near the end of the book, actually. One of the websites that I studied did actually have a sengyô shufu option. I don’t generally think much is going to come of that, and I think Japanese pop culture can be very quick to hop on a catchphrase and spin it out into a phenomenon that may or may not reflect actual lived experiences well. (You can see this in all of the discourse about ohitorisama, from the 2000s and 2010s, but every avocado toast joke about millennials also illustrates the point.)
Robert Marshall: Senda Yuki has written, “The idea that a married couple might enjoy a simple life together has never taken root in Japan.” Do you see any sense to this? If you think so, why does it seem to be the case, what might be preventing this from being the reality of married couples in Japan and the objective of people hunting for a marriage partner?
Erika Alpert: No, honestly, I don’t think there’s any sense in this, to the extent that I don’t think that the ideal of companionate marriage is necessarily the best or the most conducive to human happiness. And while it has been extensively exported from Europe and North America around the world, I don’t know that I would encourage its further spread. I think the companionate ideal is an imported one, that it has never fully rooted itself in Japanese ideas about, or experiences, of marriage, and I don’t think that necessarily needs questioning or solving. Not to be too much of a radical kinship scholar, but companionate marriage and nuclear families in isolated living quarters haven’t exactly served people well where this model has taken hold. I think we can imagine kinship bigger and better for ourselves. Collier, Rosaldo, and Yanagisako’s “Is There a Family” is a classic here that I come back to and think about all the time.
CaMP Anthropology 