Perspectives No 455: Legitimate Question

No. 455 May 2011
Legitimate Question
By James Bartholomew
2 April 2011

Yoshiko found she was pregnant and talked to her live-in lover about what they should do. His attitude was not exactly out of the PC book of ‘The Right Things To Say When Your Girlfriend Says She Is Pregnant’.

He said he was prepared to marry her as long as she accepted that she would have to carry on with her full-time job; she must also care for the child and, for good measure, do all the housework. Just to make it crystal clear, he added, ‘I won’t help’ and ‘I like my life as it is.’ It is worth mentioning, too, that the man only had a part-time job and they lived on the higher earnings of Yoshiko.

In Britain, you can imagine this chap would get a rocket-fuelled response. Yoshiko would have found it easier to manage on her own than to marry this bum. But what was her reaction? She jumped at the chance of marrying him. Why?

Because, like most young Japanese women, she really and truly wanted to avoid becoming an unmarried mother. It is a complete no-no. All around the ‘advanced’ world, births outside marriage have grown astonishingly in the past 40 years. But not in Japan. Here in Britain, 46 per cent of all births are outside marriage. In America it is 41 per cent and in France 54 per cent. In Japan, the figure barely scrapes above 2 per cent.

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ENDS

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