Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how married middle-class young women in urban Japan today imagine and negotiate the notion of motherhood and marital happiness with families (especially husbands), friends, and (sometimes) health professionals, among others.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how married middle-class young women in urban Japan imagine and negotiate the notion of motherhood and marital happiness with families (especially husbands), friends, and (sometimes) health professionals, among others. While motherhood in Japan is still regarded by many as part and parcel of "women's ordinary happiness", today it seems to have increasingly become a choice for the generation of Japanese women who were born around the time when the Equal Employment Opportunity Act (1985) was issued, went through the gender-neutral education, and now caught in the middle of the "womenomics" campaign. Often feeling torn between the neoliberal demand of self-reliance (by having a decent career) and the conventional social expectations to bear and raise children wholeheartedly, many women in urban Japan today, unlike the earlier generations, tend to ponder over the meaning of motherhood and its association with their own sense of marital happiness. Based on my year-long fieldwork in Tokyo, this paper focuses on certain "slices" or moments of several young wives' marital life revolving around motherhood and asks 1) how some women struggled between becoming a "good" mother and a "happy" woman—making the moral decision of whether to enter motherhood while knowing it might profoundly undermine their individual happiness, and 2) for those who are already mothers, what "gender strategies" (Hochschild 1989) they applied in order to balance between the simultaneously blissful and tormenting marital experience brought by their motherhood in this "lean in" era.