Item Details
Skip Navigation Links
   ActiveUsers:1256Hits:19669048Skip Navigation Links
Show My Basket
Contact Us
IDSA Web Site
Ask Us
Today's News
HelpExpand Help
Advanced search

In Basket
  Journal Article   Journal Article
 

ID171957
Title ProperCultural politics of childcare provision in the era of a shrinking Japan
LanguageENG
AuthorYamaura, Chigusa
Summary / Abstract (Note)The shortage of public childcare in Japan – called the “waitlisted children problem” (taiki jidō mondai) – has assumed increasing visibility and salience over the last several decades. This essay analyzes how this “waitlisted children problem” has been conceived, narrated, and addressed within the specific political, economic, and historical context that is contemporary Japanese society. Going beyond discussions of gender inequality in the workplace and home, the paper interrogates the cultural logics underpinning the recent urgency of debates over public childcare provision in Japan. The key to understanding these developments is recognizing how Japanese women's reproductive desires have become objectified within official and popular discussions as obstructed and requiring emancipation. Correspondingly, promoting gender equality by expanding childcare provision has become a tool of bio-political intervention, a means to remove a statistically calculated inhibition of women's reproductive desire. This links childcare with Japan's national survival, and thus helps to explain how both official and popular debates have converged in seeing the issue as significant and pressing.
`In' analytical NoteCritical Asian Studies Vol. 52, No.2; Jun 2020: p.248-269
Journal SourceCritical Asian Studies 2020-06 52, 2
Key WordsJapan ;  Welfare ;  Childcare ;  Motherhood ;  Fertility Rate