User:JonMcDonald/Population

Marriage and Demographics
According to the 2010 census, 58.9% of Japan's adult population is married, 13.9% of women and 3.1% of men are widowed, and 5.9% of women and 3.8% of men are divorced. The annual number of marriages has dropped since the early 1970s, while divorces have shown a general upward trend.

Marriage and fertility
The decline of marriage in Japan, as fewer people marry and do so later in life, is a common explanation for the plummeting birth rate. Although the total fertility rate has dropped since the 1970s (to 1.43 in 2013 ), birth statistics for married women have remained fairly constant (at around 2.1) and most married couples have two or more children. Only 2% of births occur outside of marriage (compared to 30-60% in Europe and North America) due to social taboos, legal pressure, and financial hurdles. Half of Japan's single mothers live below the poverty line, among the highest for OECD countries.

Fewer marriages
The majority of Japanese people remain committed to conventional ideas of family, with a husband who provides financial support, a wife who works in the home, and two children. Almost 90% of unmarried people intend to marry, and yet the percentage of people who don't continues to rise. Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of 50-year-old people who had never married roughly quadrupled for men to 20.1% and doubled for women to 10.6%. The Welfare Ministry predicts these numbers to rise to 29% of men and 19.2% of women by 2035. The government's population institute estimated in 2014 that women in their early 20s have a one-in-four chance of never marrying, and a two-in-five chance of remaining childless. While recent media coverage has sensationalized data from the Japan Family Planning Association that shows a declining interest in dating and sexual relationships among young people, changes in sexuality and fertility are more likely an outcome of the decline in family formation than its cause.

According to the sociologist Masahiro Yamada, the failure of conventions to adapt to the realities of Japanese society has caused a "gap in family formation" between those who attain the economic conditions necessary to create family and those who remain single and childless. Stagnant wages and job insecurity have made it more and more difficult for young Japanese people to create a conventional family, despite their desire to do so. Income is important to most unmarried women (80%), according to a survey by the Meiji Yasuda Institute, but a majority of single women (68%) expect an income that only a minority of eligible men (25%) actually earns. Japan was once well-known for lifetime employment, but the job economy changed after the asset price bubble burst and the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Companies began employing more people on temporary or part-time contracts or through temporary employment agencies, rather than as regular full-time employees. Regular employment for unmarried men age 25-34 dropped from 78% in 1982 to 55% in 2010.

Even for married couples, economic factors, such as the cost of raising a child, work-family conflicts, and insufficient housing, are the most common reasons for young mothers (under 34) to have fewer children than desired. The number of single-child or childless couples has increased since 2002 (to 23.3 percent in 2010) even as the desire for larger families remains the same.

Later marriages
The average age at first marriage in Japan has climbed steadily from the middle of the 20th century to around 31 for men and 29 for women in 2013, among the highest in Asia. Women who have given birth to two or more children married around the age of 24, but the average age has not been that low for women in general since 1970. Women postpone marriage for a variety of reasons, including high personal and financial expectations, increasing independence afforded by education and employment, and the difficulty of balancing work and family. The spiral of population decline will continue to accelerate as women remain unmarried through their child-bearing years, decline in number, or are drawn into the workforce to compensate for labor shortages and low wages.