On the institutional level of the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education, the implementation of various programs promoted by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and the Ministry of Economics, Trade, and Industry has been proceeding over the last decade. Furthermore, I will show the benefits as well as limitations of NPO–involvement in career guidance at these institutions.ĭata from extensive fieldwork in form of interviews at nine general metropolitan senior high schools as well as two colleges of technology and participant observation during NPO–led career guidance events at eleven metropolitan senior high schools form the basis of the dissertation at hand. I will provide ethnographic data which allows the reader to better understand the involvement of civil society groups like NPOs on the level of metropolitan senior high schools.īy combining the theoretical concepts of institutional social capital by Brinton (2000), Okano’s (2016) concept of nonformal education as well as Estévez–Abe’s (2003) state–society–partnerships and Ogawa’s (2009) NPO–ization by the government, I provided a framework which allows a more comprehensive and holistic understanding of the current struggle of general senior high schools in providing adequate career guidance. It examines how and why the nature of career guidance has been changing rather drastically in the recent years and analyzes the consequences for the metropolitan general senior high school as an institution which by many is still considered to have the obligation to facilitate a smooth transition into the labor market.
The following dissertation will shed more light on the interface between formal schooling, NPO–led career guidance, and labor market entry. This has serious implications on the role of formal schooling in contemporary Japan. Not only the private sector but civil society has an ever–growing role in the facilitation of knowledge and skill sets. Individual needs have become so diverse that the traditional actors of the Japanese education system can no longer satisfy them. The demand for education has changed rapidly due to social change and globalization over the last decades. Specifically, this article examines how newly emergent non-normative gender tropes, such as the ‘herbivore-type man’, are regarded with ambivalence by both men and women, as well as how traditional gender norms persist within the singles’ psyche despite their increasing social irrelevance. It can be argued that the current absence of past institutions that mediated interpersonal connections has left the recent generation who came of age during the two ‘lost decades’ deprived of relevant gender scripts as well as appropriate gendered expectations. Based upon qualitative research conducted at multiple ‘marriage hunting’ venues within the Tokyo metropolis, this article analyses contemporary Japanese singlehood within the framework of the ‘culture of uncertainty’, which scholars have argued characterizes post-bubble ‘precarious Japan’. At the core of this puzzle is a prevalence of virginity and significantly decreased inter-gender interaction among the singles as a whole.
However, among contemporary Japanese people of childbearing age, the never-married singlehood rate is ever-increasing amidst a dearth of alternative forms of partnership, a consistently high demand for marriage, and a thriving ‘marriage hunting’ (konkatsu) market. Romantic partnership formation by itself has remained intact in most postindustrial societies despite declining marriage rates. This trend is echoed in Nemoto, Fuwa, and Ishiguro (2013) study that analyses the ambivalence that never-married employed men feel about marriage under a veneer of a stated desire for marriage as well as these men's preference for the traditional division of labor in marriages. This is consistent with the trend that, although there is an increase in single men who have unknowingly come to embody new gender tropes that evoke opposite traits from that of the 'salaryman' ideology, the previously hegemonic masculinity of the 'corporate warrior' has remained within the national psyche, so much so that even a 'freeter' (furıta) (part-time contractbased worker) would adhere to traditional gender norms of being the 'head of household' in a marriage, and would desire to be treated as such by his partner, regardless of his inability to provide financial security as sole breadwinner (Cook 2014). The single men that I interviewed also emphasized that the 'suitable' woman would be positive and bright, but certainly 'not voracious' (gatsu gatsu shiteinai), because this 'carnivorousness' would imply a sense of aggression.