東アジアの低出生率と家族主義 : 半圧縮近代としての日本

Abstract

The first question of this article is whether we can consider that East Asia is going through a second demographic transition, just like Europe. The second question is whether individualism is also the cause for the low fertility in East Asia. The answer to the first question is both yes and no, because the demographic changes currently underway in East Asia have similarities to those in Europe and North America, but there are considerable differences in essence. Fertility in Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong has declined to a new global low level. The rise in cohabitation is slow and births out of wedlock are avoided. Marriage as an institution of duty and responsibility rather than intimacy is still intact in East Asia. Because of that, when family relationships changed from being social resources to being risks during the economic crisis, risk-aversive individualization occurred to avoid the burden of a family. The answer to the second question, therefore, is that it was not individualism but familialism that is causing the current demographic and family changes in East Asia. The cause of the prevalence of familialism in East Asia is not primarily cultural factors, but compressed modernity. In the semi-compressed modernity in Japan, the anachronistic familialist reform of the 1980s consolidated the family and gender structure of the 1960s, which then resisted the economic and demographic changes in the 1990s, resulting in the "lost decades" since then. In contrast, in other East Asian societies that experienced a much stronger compression of modernity took a course of liberal familialism that makes use of the global market in the name of the family. We may say that both types of familialism have failed in constructing a sustainable social system.