Autonomy and responsibility: Women’s life and career choices in urban Japan

Based on fieldwork and interviews collected over the past decade, this article examines how young single women in Tokyo are trying to make choices for their careers, navigating between the political economy of labour and reproduction. The article looks at how these women make choices within an ever-changing context where the Japanese moral economy of the postwar coexists with a neoliberal articulation of individual responsibility for life choices. Their experiences reveal the important contradictions between the conservative work regime within companies and the flexible job market they have created. This creates impossible contradictions that place women in both a precarious job market, and when they work in more stable conditions, results in the impossibility of having a family. This article will discuss how, despite these contradictions, young women create meaningful work while attempting to find freedom of choice as they try to define work and life choices not only as a social and moral responsibility, but also as an individual choice. In other words, I seek to show how life choices articulated during the post-growth era are creating new configurations and new challenges within the context of Japan’s ongoing economic and demographic challenges.