A growing number of Japanese women are giving up on their male counterparts, taking the risk that seeking love abroad will bring them qualities in a partner that seem rare at home.
Mr. Right, as expected, is often an American or European, a man who appreciates a wife’s career and more of a partner in daily chores.
“They treat you as an equal and don’t hesitate to express mutual feelings of respect. I think Western men are more adept at [at such things] than Japanese men,” says Ms. Mizuguchi, 36, who works at a major trading firm. “They don’t act like women are servants; I think they see women as individuals.”
Underscoring that Japanese women are losing hope with local guys, dating agencies have sprung up to help hook up a Western husband in Tokyo, some with branches in the US and Europe. These companies rigorously vet their clients, looking at education, family background, occupation, and life goals.
The type of women who sign up for these services include doctors, lawyers and other professionals, women who have delayed marriage to focus on their careers and who are unwilling to give up their hard-earned earnings to become homemakers. , as many Japanese men expect. .
Japanese women have come to regard traditional marital roles as “disadvantageous in terms of time resources: they have to carry the burden of housework and waste free time,” says Chizuko Ueno, a sociology professor at the University of Tokyo.
Normally, married Japanese women not only have to take care of their own parents in old age, but also their in-laws.
When it comes to raising children, “they can’t expect much cooperation from their partner” due to the long working hours required in many Japanese corporations and because of established gender roles that assume women are in charge of raising children. , Ms. Ueno adds.
A generation of women now entering their thirties doesn’t want to give up the single life unless potential partners are willing to break with traditional gender roles.
Government surveys conducted to find out why women postpone marriage until well after age 25, known as a woman’s “best before” date, show that financial independence is key to change.
Since most Japanese women have their own income, marriage is no longer a financial necessity, and women want to find companionship in a husband.
That is where Japanese men have gone short. There is “a huge gap in men’s and women’s attitudes and expectations toward marriage” versus traditional gender roles, says Sumiko Iwao, a professor of social psychology at the Musashi Institute of Technology in Yokohama. For example, coming home later than your Japanese husband is a no-no.
Having ruled out an old-fashioned Japanese husband, many women here think a Western man is the answer. In fact, some seem so taken with the idea that they are willing to spend thousands of dollars to inspect the products themselves.
Of the 2,000+ women on the books of a large matchmaking agency, about 200 travel to the US or Europe each month to meet prospects.
Sentimental projections have also recently spread to Korean men, due to romantic Korean soap operas.
In 2003, Japanese women who married American or British men outnumbered Japanese men who married American or British women by a ratio of 8 to 1.
The total proportion of Japanese who marry foreigners each year has risen from about 3.5 percent in 1995 to just over 5 percent.
Japanese men are actually three times as likely as women to take a foreign spouse, but they are mostly rural men marrying less affluent Chinese and Filipino women. “These cases are elderly farmers who are not popular with Japanese girls,” says Yuriko Hashimoto, a local government employee in the remote northern Iwate prefecture.
To be fair, not all of the blame for female angst here can be laid on Japanese men. The government has been slow to enforce equal opportunity laws, and both wages and the glass ceiling in most Japanese corporations remain low for women.
The recession has hampered longer maternity leave and other family-friendly policies.
As Japan’s fertility rate falls to new lows – at last count it was 1.29, well below levels needed for population replacement – the ruling Liberal Democratic Party is anxiously drawing up plans to ease the child-rearing to young couples, through measures such as the provision of cheap public housing.