This paper examines the factors that make many married women living in the Tokyo metropolitan suburbs quit their jobs after getting married and reenter the workforce after completing child-rearing in terms of labor market segmentation by gender, age, and space. In the Tokyo metropolitan area, the labor market is segmented; it is male and unmarried female full-time workers who work in the central city, and married women take part-time employment in the suburbs. Women working in the central city become housewives in the suburbs after marriage under such circumstances in the labor market. For families with infants living in the suburbs, the proportion of dual-earner households is only one-fifth of the total.
Observing the changes in the links between home and work caused by marriage can provide insight into the causal factors. Because existing data cannot be used for this purpose, we made use of a unique data set collected through a questionnaire survey of 301 households in Urawa city, Saitama Prefecture, in the suburbs of Tokyo. This data set includes abundant information regarding places of residence and employment before and after marriage.
The first step in the analysis is to examine the impact of long-distance marriage migration on changes in women's working circumstances. Because of the distance between the couples' workplaces before getting married, relationships between the family and the workplace undergo drastic changes. In cases where the distance was 30km or greater in particular, most wives left their jobs or changed their workplaces. The results of the quantitative analysis using Quantification Theory II suggest that the impact of migration after marriage on the changes in wives' working conditions is stronger than that of schooling and the occupation of the couples. This lowers the percentage of employment among married women in the suburbs.
The second step in the analysis is to illustrate the commuting patterns of 219 households in which both the wives and husbands lived in the Tokyo metropolitan area before or around the time of their marriage. Although 24% of the wives of those households left their jobs after marriage, 69% became dual-earner households thereafter. Generally in suburban dual-earner households after child-rearing, husbands commute to the central city and wives take up jobs in the neighborhood; however, that commuting pattern accounted for only 12% of the dual-earner households. This originates from the labor market conditions segmented by gender, age and space. In 34% of the dual-earner households, wives and husbands commuted from the suburbs to the center of Tokyo in about 60 minutes. Since this commuting pattern is inconsistent with the housework and child rearing, wives who worked in the center of Tokyo showed a marked tendency to quit their jobs after marriage. These results suggest that the Tokyo metropolitan area needs patriarchal institutions justifying the predominance of men over women to sustain its structure.

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The purpose of this paper is to explain how rhetorical terms helped to construct social problems concerning the regulation of telephone dating services, which were seen as a new “harmful” environment for juveniles by neighborhood residents in Toyama Prefecture, Japan, during 1993-1998. With the focus on the social constructionism that has recently become prominent in the social sciences, this paper emphasizes how this harmful environment for juveniles was constructed through the rhetoric of social problems in various arenas and simultaneously was made out to be greater than it actually was.
As the number of telephone dating services increased, the corresponding number of cases of sexually deviant behavior also increased according to official police statistics during 1993-1994. In addition, the idea that girls participating in telephone dating services were helpless victims who had been irreparably harmed by men who used their services was firmly implanted in the minds of the general public through local media sources. Many forms of rhetorical discourse were employed in various public arenas, but the most influential was the “rhetoric of loss, ” which in this case was signified the loss of juveniles' sexual innocence. This representation is difficult to refute in Japanese society. The police, a concerned group of parent neighbors, and local newspapers together attempted to uphold the good image of juveniles in Toyama Prefecture. The local community at large was very receptive to this representation, and therefore it was firmly believed that the space (both geographic and virtual) surrounding telephone dating services was harmful to children's general well-being.
It was particularly significant that this representation was accompanied by the simultaneous representation of sexual deviancy in the community. This may be connected to the idea that the social and moral “pollution” associated with girls who participated in telephone dating services could spread to otherwise innocent girls. This notion was largely based upon the fear that they could “infect” other girls with their deviancy, thus eliminating the innocence of an entire age group. This depended upon a dual image of juvenile girls as both innocent and criminal. One side of the dichotomy represented girls as sexual victims, and the other as nymph seductresses. Therefore the treatment of their sexual partners could account for the way in which a local community enforces moral boundaries, social order, and contradictory representations of the young.
The contradictory representation of the same group of juvenile girls in the local community intensified the policing of men's behavior toward them as well as the policing of the behavior of the girls themselves. It is significant that the activities that distinguished between categories of innocence and impurity, while excluding discussion of the deviancy itself, helped to reinforce the identity of the local community as a place composed only of appropriate spaces and subjects. In this context, the representation of the loss of juvenile sexual innocence could be a powerful rhetorical tool for maintaining local collectivity.

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