Crisis, Work, and Marriage with Young Women in Tokyo
This article focuses on the significance of work for women in Japan during a period of economical upheaval. Drawing on fieldwork in Tokyo and based on interview data with fifteen young women, it shows how they negotiate the contradictions between the economical difficulties, their definition of work and desire for self-realization. Discussed here are on the one hand women’s efforts to appropriate the professional world to establish a sense of autonomy, and on the other hand, how marriage plays a key role in relation to work and their career. In this perspective, work is not merely seen in terms of production, but rather as a matrix of meanings. Work is discussed here while considering the articulation of power relations and how they structure the social, without reducing the social to its structures by taking into account the fluid, moving and ambiguous aspect of practices and representations.