My friend is doing doctorate research in sociology at a university here in Tokyo. For her study, she asked over 1000 Japanese women and over 1000 American/Canadian women. One of the questions she asked was “What is more important in a partner? Chemistry or Career?” **78%** of Japanese women said “Career” implying money supersedes personality/chemistry. On the other hand, only **39%** of American/Canadian women felt this way with a solid majority opting for “chemistry/personality”.
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Because Japanese women have less career opportunities and therefore depend on their partner’s income more than Western women.
I would think your friend would be able to answer that question better than anyone here.
Either Japanese women are more honest or they grew up reading fewer Harlequin romance novels.
Because we are treated like shit in the workplace and make considerably less money when doing the same job.
Sure, some women want a rich guy, but most of us just want someone who at least make a decent salary for their age and isn’t doing Uber Eats for a living.
They are just more honest and realistic than their western counterparts.
money.
This will probably get downvoted….
If you ask young women what they want to be, many here will say “housewife”. What they mean is the type of housewife that can spend the day shopping and eating cake with other “housewives”.
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The real issue is how insurance and pension work. If a spouse goes over that 1.3 million and the bread winner makes less than 4, they may end up with less money. Usually if both spouses work they both make over 5.
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Marriage is often seen here as a “business contract” (for lack of a better term) whereas in the West, marriage is seen as something romantic. In a contractual situation things such as quality of life, household dynamics, economics, child rearing, etc. become much more important than “feelings.” Many Japanese who want to get married have a mindset of “we can work on love” rather than “I need to fall in love.” This is why arranged marriages are still relatively popular here. “Falling in love” seems to be reserved for teenagers and those in their early 20s and why many women will have boyfriends that they’d never consider marrying, even if they are head over heals with them.
There are obvious problems with both approaches to marriage, and in reality I’m sure most Japanese women would like to have both, “falling in love with the perfect man with the perfect paycheck.” And probably that is why many people do not find a partner.
A lot of people still have parents who were match made(generally by parents looking at things like career). And surprisingly match-made partnerships often are more harmonious. I guess it’s that whole thin line between love and hate.
People look differently about love and marriage here. Marriage is looking for a dependable father/mother while love is about chemistry etc. So yeah… dependable->career.
There’s a lot more to having a career than just money. Responsibility and ambition are really important.
I call bullshit on the 39% of American women not caring about her partners salary.
Japan is one of the last first world countries where an average single earner can support a family without poverty levels of living. Makes sense that people care that their potential spouse can support them both.
What was the word used for “chemistry” in the survey? That may have helped skew the results…
Just gotta find the good 22% 😂😂 . Why would you want a woman who thinks career is more important that chemistry 🤷😂. If anything , they are helping you , as you know not to pick them.
Because marriage means different in Japan than in the western. Here its social construction is more important than the personal; so people marry for and because society, not for personal reasons. Marriage =/= love to your partner. I know dozens of women than met and married their husbands but dont love them. I’ve heard tons of times of couples married but still never consummated.
Its just a social status, thats why you have still omiai and arranged introductions.
A woman only needs to focus on the reputation of their partner, i.e. their job, rank and income. Nothing else is really important for choosing a partner. If he is handsome or nice or you like him, that is just a nice bonus.
For love, you always have affairs and fuuzoku, which is surprisingly, also somewhat understood in society.
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edit1: also, unfortunately, I also heard tons of stories of wives divorcing their partners after they get fired or lose a job. just imagine, you are going through a difficult situation and your partner, instead of supporting you, leaves you and takes your place and everything. that would be almost criminal in my country, but here all the ladies in the neighborhood are “un, un, yeah good thing she left that unemployed scum”.
here losing your job is a “valid” reason to divorce your partner. in the west I believe that is frown upon, you are the bad one for not supporting each other on times of need.
Gotta love questionnaire-based sociology studies: can’t wait to see the beep curves and meaningless venn diagrams…
Probably just being more honest.
May this be a major factir in low birth rates?
There are only so many high-paying jobs in an economy.
Meh, there’s gold diggers in every culture.
Personally, I believe if you’re not in a relationship for love, you’re really missing out (and inviting a whole lot of other problems into your life).
But, people make their own choices and I respect their right to do so.
My guess is because they learned it by looking at their parents relationship life and others around them. Heavily influenced by old generation and deeply ingrained tradition which goes way back during Edo period when marriages were mainly based on social ranking or political interests.
Just make sure you have a decent career and you have nothing to worry about.
Honestly chemistry is a bit of a luxury and not totally necessary, while being able to support your family is totally necessary. Most younger households these days have dual incomes and I personally think it’s important both have good careers and incomes.
Before I got married my now wife and I had a pretty frank conversation about what our marriage would look like and we both agreed our careers were important and there would be no stay at home spouse in our marriage.
Probably due to more realistic expectations and the fact that western people tend to think in extremes, like it’s 100% career and 0% chemistry or vice versa
They look for chemistry in their boyfriend after they’re married.
I don’t know if your friend is non-Japanese and I don’t know how she structured her questions, but, you need to consider that in Japan, women are actively persuaded to not go into “difficult” careers because they won’t be able to find a partner. They are not encouraged to go to top universities because men would feel some feels about a women who went to a better university and was better educated.
Throughout the world there are companies that will refuse to hire women with kids, women they think might have kids, women in general. Too many men want to justify this or act like it doesn’t happen. If a person is passed over for a job and they believe it is due to discrimination, they have to do a lot of work to prove that…
I notice that excluding North America, Australia /New Zealand, and some parts of western Europe, that most of the world is made up of people who’d answer that question similarly.
I do think western men come to Japan with a savior mindset, thinking they will be a little better than Japanese men by washing a dish or changing a diaper and that Japanese women are just desperate to be stay at home moms and “traditional” housewives… “traditional” in the 1930s West sense where men take care of all the bills and the woman is treated like a child.
In Japan and East Asia and maybe much of the world, a guy is expected to have a stable job so his wife can take care of the household finances.
Not everyone wants to live a life chasing discounted bean sprouts or making a week’s worth of meal prep for a whole family while living with a guy who can’t speak Japanese and taking care of a kid.
Ok, so this one is totally anecdotal. My wife’s sister asked me to set her up with a foreigner. I was a bit confused. She doesn’t speak English. What does she want with a foreigner? I was then informed that Japanese men are pretty terrible in general. They don’t really give a shit about the woman and basically do the bare minimum in the relationship. Is that true? No idea. Sounds hyperbolic, but regardless of the truth, that’s apparently the belief. A few of her friends backed up the story.
My wife’s father was apparently completely absent from parenting when she was a kid. Did his own thing of an evening. Got home late and demanded a specific meal be cooked for him. All that good old classic misogyny stuff. Her grandpa would allegedly simply flip the table if he didn’t get what he wanted for dinner. Is this still prevalent today? No idea, but the women in my life think it is. If they are going to go into that sort of relationship, then they need it to be worth their effort.
Because they want to, why is it what’s western always the standard people should follow
I never liked this kind of post, it says a study result with numbers but provided so little information. Where is more information on this study? Any paper or abstract at least? What University?
It creates an automated assumption that by choosing career, not to mention that you wrote about implying this choice by putting special importance on money, these women don’t have careers and prefer to stay home doing nothing. Also, putting one thing as more important than another doesn’t mean the other factors have zero importance.
When presenting a study result, it’s wise to also present the background of people being interviewed to ensure objectivity of the data. Their age profile, education background, career, domicile, etc. You should first ask this question to your friend who conducted this survey instead of reddit.
I’m no Japanese woman but it’s unfair to them to share this kind of biased information. This is not the first one. It may seem harmless to most, but it’s potentially shifting how people in this subreddit who don’t know any Japanese women in their life, just starting their life here, and basing their opinions about Japanese women on this information.
Link to the research?
If your friend is a doctorate level researcher they should know that while self-reporting is useful in research, it’s not reliable for getting hard data since people are biased, lie, say what sounds good, say what they think society wants them to say, etc.
This self reported information should be compared to what people are actually doing, and that data should be incorporated into another round of interviews asking subject about discrepancies found in the real world data vs. what they/people respond to this question with.
You’ve got the actually prove the premise before you start asking why the premise is true, self reporting isn’t enough to claim that a majority of Japanese women actually feel/think this way.
Brother, you gotta talk to an actual sociologist. You’re not going to get well informed takes from us.
Anyone who says “because they are realistic”, is being beyond reductionist, and you probably won’t be able to write that as the conclusion to your paper.
Because you’re gonna be gone 12 hours a day anyway, may as well make money. But seriously, this is a very broad generalization and everyone is different with different priorities.
ITT a lot of unrealistic expectations from people that don’t make much money.
Many (not all) Japanese jobs tend to require ridiculous working hours and being on call. This is particularly true as a “manager”, a title which is widely abused so the employee does not get paid overtime.
Many ambitious women find themselves forced to choose a non-career track job if they want children. Partly this is because their husbands (and men in general) are typically paid more and have more opportunities, but are also working constantly.
The alternative to this kind of work is more casual employment, which is often paid badly and has bad or no benefits.
This problem of excessive work is slightly less true than it was in, say, the 1990s, when there started to be “karoshi” lawsuits after many employees literally died from overwork. But the work culture still is pretty exploitative.
Part of the problem is that Japanese employees often are “permanent”, which makes them very hard to fire. So companies try to avoid this kind of employment or, alternatively, do the work with too few employees.
I feel like the system needs to be re-examined.
I could ask a whole lot of questions about how that thousand people were selected, like relative income levels. I’m sure if you selected from different social strata in the USA and Canada you’d get very different answers.
And a major factor here would be how much time they expect to spend with that person. In Japan the expectation is that the husband will be working long hours, and might even be moved at the drop of a hat to a different city while the wife remains in the home town to raise the kids with the support of the grandparents. In short, there’s no expectation of even living in the same city after marriage, never mind spending “quality time” together.
In the USA and Canada there’s an expectation that they will spend a fair amount of “quality time” with their partner on weekends, and that later there will be “family time”.
In short, in Japan the husband’s largest impact on the wife’s life is their bank balance. In the USA/Canada they’re actually expected to be around.
Now that’s simplifying a ridiculously complicated social dynamic to its core, but it is largely correct.
1) Hmm, first of all, the concept of people having value outside of what they contribute is an Abraham religion concept. In Japan, people do not have value outside of what they provide, their status etc, and they treated accordingly by rest of the society. So, it is not just Japanese women, it is entire Japanese society treating men based on their career. I recommend watching hikikomari documentary by NHK. These people are not insane. They just live in a society that decided they have no value after they lost their job. Also, Tokyo Sonata movie had a Japanese husband who could not tell his family he lost his job. This is a big issue.
2) Japanese women’s career options are extremely limited. It is culturally more normalized for women to work at most part time, take care of the house, and spend the rest of the day lining up for a fancy restaurant or cafe spending their husband’s salary. In Tokyo at least, there is a whole industry on housewives” and old people’s money. You will see a lot of culture and sport events taking place in working hours. You will see anywhere fancy has 90% housewives and retired old people client. They simply want to take a part in this life style that is everywhere in Tokyo.
3) Extreme misogyny comes with fragile male ego, forcing woman to be even more submissive, at a child level. A different kind of women would be perceived as a threat and treated even worse as well. So, this is a systematic problem. Individuals choices can only go so far.
If they are going to bother dating a westerner, why limit yourself to folks who have limited futures (alts).
And a lot know what they want — usually kids — and don’t want to waste time playing the field.
Chemistry doesn’t pay the bills, especially if she’s pining to being a stay at home mom
But remember when passport bros figure they go to (_____pick eastern nation) and get rained on with puss. Not thinking that if they aren’t getting any in the west they most Def are not pulling women in the east.
Remember when they thought bringing her back stateside. Into his 1000 Sq foot apartment with a TV and blowup mattress at from Walmart…was like….Def the ALPHA MOVE!!!
MEMBAA?!
Chemistry can’t pay the bills
It’s funny seeing all the posts calling women gold diggers. Women wanting their spouse to earn a salary of 5mil+ ain’t gold digging 😂
A lot of you are living in some serious poverty if you think 5mil is a lot
I think this is common in the west as well.
As some others have mentioned, more details about the survey wording and the demographics of the respondents would help us make better sense of what meaning and significance the survey has.
For example, asking young women who have never had any partner is likely to yield different results than asking older women who have been or are now married. Inexperienced younger people tend to have abstract and idealistic ideas about what they want and prefer in a partner, but when they actually spend time with someone, their actual feelings and emotions can quickly replace the dreamy expectations.
Does “partner” mean spouse necessarily? Might it just mean a guy they date or a steady boyfriend? Husband and boyfriend are vastly different entities. By analogy, it’s a safe bet that many guys on this sub would probably say that in their younger single days what they appreciated and looked for in women for dating is not exactly the same as what they would or do value in a life partner such as their wife today.
Also the meaning of “chemistry” is ambiguous at best, since it could be interpreted as sexual attraction, a good personality match, or something else.
It would be helpful to know more about the details of the survey, and by the same token, it would be interesting to know if there is data to support some of the sweeping claims made here in comments about Japanese women and the institution of marriage in this country.
Because Japanese women are smarter. You’d get the same percentages for being able to do long division correctly.
Marriage is still seen in a very traditional way there. Westerners added romantic love into the equation for marriage but that’s a fairly new addition all things considered.
The west is the only place where I see women being breadwinners and willing to marry men who make less than them. I can think of 3 coworkers off the top of my head in this relationship dynamic with the woman earning more in the US. For all the complaints made about western women and gold digging, they are the most open to disparity in income for men, in my opinion.
Anywhere else, women are pretty cutthroat and completely not shy about how they think a man is useless if his income is below a certain threshold.