A cultural anthropologist like me talks with many people, in this case over many years. Her main aim is to give voice to these people’s stories and experiences through a process of listening closely and thinking about them in relation to almost everything else she reads and does. The final result is her tale of these stories, for in their retelling the anthropologist also recounts a tale of herself, of her encounter with these people, and of the meaning that she understands in these encounters. This is truer than ever in this globalized age when these Japanese women and I...

I finished scribbling down blurbs from the ads for women’s magazines hanging in the center of the subway car and ran for the door. As I made my way through the surge of bodies in the downtown Tokyo station, passing shops and restaurants in the underground mall, my eye was caught momentarily by a young woman in a deep-purple jacket, not a common color in 1993. Wouldn’t it be interesting if she were my next interviewee, I thought. A glance at my watch told me that I needed to rush through the back streets to my small business hotel in...

“Every corner of my house is me. It is an extension of myself.” Baba-san, a freelance interpreter of forty-five, waved me into her Tokyo apartment in 2004. Only fifteen minutes from a main Tokyo station, it could not have been cheap. The apartment smelled like oden, a Japanese stew. “I got so much interpreting work when I came home from London that I really hit the money and paid this off! Now I am trying to have a normal life. I knew money wouldn’t make me happy. I’m not trying to be a winner or loser.”

A single woman friend...

Serious, straight-backed, and dressed in dark colors, Yamamura- san held her hand on her chest as we talked in a Tokyo family restaurant in 2004. She had married quickly at thirty-five to a man she had once refused, and against the advice of her mother, sister, and superiors at the bank where she worked. Her work had lost its meaningfulness, she said, and “I think it is important to marry.” She appreciated the fact that this man did not object to her discussion of art therapy or Christianity, both of which she had espoused as an adult, even travelling to...

Minami-san’s husband was playing a game with his eight-year-old son on the shrine stairs as we climbed up on our sightseeing tour.

“Three times two!” her husband said.

“Six!” their son answered, and they advanced six steps.

“Minus four!” Shouted father, adjusting his heavy sunglasses.

“Two!” said the son, and he went down two. I glanced at Minami-san, who was looking on with a smile in her eyes. When we reached the top of the hill, we rang the bell and gazed out to sea while the son swung on the railing.

Minami-san had married a professor whom she met...

As I walked down the broad sidewalk in Tokyo, neck craned upwards to spy “Toyota” above the towering stone entrances, I felt curious, as if in by looking into the life of the woman working nineteen floors above me I would find out something about myself. Of the three Toyota secretaries whom I interviewed in 1993, only Matsui-san had remained at the company, still an “office lady” after twenty-five years of work, but now married with a son. Of all the married Tokyo interviewees in 2004, she alone was still working full-time while raising a child. What motivated and challenged...

In this book, I have traced the paths of Japanese women who in the beginning of the 1990s were single, over the accepted marriage age, and participating in their generation’s form of resistance against the cultural code of postwar modernity. Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, these women have struggled both with external contradictions between historical and global influences in Japan and with internal contradictions between their desires to actualize an independent self in the spirit of late modernity and their wish for inclusion in the changing relations and positions of postwar family and work. This book has striven...

was not able to interview these women again until 2012, almost exactly a year after the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear plant explosion of March 2011 in Japan. Although the results are not fully analyzed, I want to share some of the women’s experiences and thoughts connected with these tragedies. This brief report serves as a fitting epilogue to this book, because for many women, the quake, tsunami, and radiation marked a high tide of risk in their lives as individuals, families, and citizens of a nation, revealing their reactions along the continuum of risk and stability in their lives.1

The...