Tracing the lives of women from Japan’s ‘lost generation’ over three decades

Australian tourists now flock to Japan for an inexpensive holiday. But some of you may recall the 1980s when people saw Japan as an expensive destination. As our views of Japan as a holiday destination have changed over the last three decades, so too has the internal workings of the society and ordinary people’s experiences.

In the early 1990s Japan faced the end of sustained economic growth and the bubble economy, followed by recession, structural changes and institutional reforms. The 1990s were later described as the ‘lost decade’ by the media and public, and produced a generation dubbed ‘rosu jene’ (lost generation), the first generation to enter a radically transformed workforce and an adult world of changing social norms and resistance to them. That local governments, in the early 2020s began advertising permanent positions specifically for now middle-aged rosu-jene attests to the gravity of their struggles.

I have traced a group of the same rosu-jene women in Kobe, Japan, for three decades, since they were Year 12 high schoolers. They entered the workforce after high school in April 1990 and experienced firsthand structural changes from the social periphery, having limited family-based resources and social networks.

Changing gender roles

Structural changes were visible in national trends. Since the ‘lost decade’, the traditional life-time employment and seniority wage system in large corporations has been wound back, with more workers in non-continuing jobs. Female labour participation rose as more married women with children took on paid employment, due to the uncertainty of their partners’ jobs in the restructured employment market. The use of parental leave also increased.

More people remained unmarried and came to be described by the buzzword ‘ohitorisama’ (literally, Ms/Mr Single). This has contributed to a declining birth rate since few children are born outside marriage due to the perceived social stigma. Cases of divorce increased, as did the number of single mothers. Japan tops the world’s aging populations with those aged 65 or older reaching almost 30% as of early 2025. The national population has been declining since 2009. With growing inward migration and an increasing number of international marriages Japan has become more multi-ethnic. In this context cultural norms have become more accommodating of diversity (e.g., gender, ethnicity, disability, lifestyle choices) both socially and institutionally. Yet Japan has continued to rank low in the Global Gender Gap Index, at 118 amongst 146 countries in 2024 and was the only G7 country that failed to make the top 100 (World Economic Forum, 2024).

The lives of Kobe women

From the Kobe women’s narratives, we learn of their three-decade lived experience from the periphery as non-tertiary educated working class women. At 18 they began permanent employment gained via a school-based referral system, but saw their employers begin outsourcing jobs. They then faced the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in 1995, with some being displaced from their homes. Some married in their late teens and were divorced within a few years. Many of those who married in their late 20s (the national medium age) had children in their 30s, negotiating their roles in family (including as the household finance manager) and in kinship relations. Women married to first sons (chōnan, the family heir) reluctantly gained a symbolically elevated status within his extended family relations and the responsibility to care for his parents in their old age. Women with children prioritised their identity as ‘mother’, taking up the kind of casual jobs that enabled them to fulfill a ‘good mother’ role’ and were even prepared to forgive their husbands’ extramarital affairs for the sake of the children.

Some of the women remained single. Some took the initiative to transfer to a university graduate career track under the new national policy to encourage women’s promotion. Japan-born zainichi[1] Korean women married to Japanese nationals took up Japanese citizenship after having children but still referred to themselves as zainichi. Women individually tried to perform expected social roles; but when facing immediate circumstances that did not allow them to do so, circumvented, and gave new interpretations to, some norms. For example, a woman married to the family heir cares for an unmarried aging maternal uncle, using a home care service funded by the national care insurance scheme.

They realised that the norms themselves were slowly changing but were unaware that their individual decisions and actions collectively were contributing to these changes.

Following the same women in ‘real time’ as their lives unfolded over three decades, the longitudinal ethnography approach adopted has illuminated how the women’s trajectories (biographies) were guided by their decisions and actions in pursuit of what they considered happiness (which altered as they aged). Decisions they made at one point in time had cumulative consequences in creating/restricting future resources and opportunities, which in turn influenced their subsequent decisions. Over their life courses, the women shifted in relative weight across multiple identities based on social roles in expanding human relationships (e.g., as worker, daughter, mother, wife, daughter-in-law).

By age 40 most of the Kobe women seemed to find happiness when experiencing fulfilment, love and comfort from largely simple pleasures in their sometimes seemingly mundane lives. The Kobe women’s stories continue to unfold as they enter their 40s and beyond, as do my conversations with them, which I hope to capture in my future writing.

Footnotes: 

1. Zainichi Korean are descendants of former Japanese imperial subjects with special permanent resident status. The term used to refer only to non-Japanese nationals but is now increasingly used by Japanese nationals of zainichi Korean heritage.

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