The family has become a central issue of concern for policy makers in Japan due to demographic and socioeconomic changes. The resurgence of the family-crisis theme in the United States in the 1970s reflected the changing patterns of familial living as options among alternative life styles. The break-down of such assumptions as “the family as a group” and “two-parenthood”, and the increasing visibility of non-modal living styles over time has legitimated the emergence of new perspectives. Sex roles and gender research has accumulated a considerable amount of evidence to indicate that the wife's decreasing economic dependency on the husband, or woman's increasing autonomy, has shaken the modern family ideology. Life course studies and social network studies have shown the effectiveness of using the individual as the unit of analysis in studying the family. Through the review of the above research areas, this paper attempts to present a framework to explain a mechanism of family change, claiming that woman's independent access to economic resources brings the modern family system based on the “provider-housewife” role-pairing to an end. This process is the “individualization of the family” because the autonomy of each spouse is assumed. An application of such a framework is intended to interpret seemingly relevant scenes of contemporary Japanese families.

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The privatization phenomenon in the familial world was empirically studied, with particular attention paid to the relations between the family and external systems.
Terms originally defined for our study are: 1) “privatization” as a horizontal division and 2) “individuation” as a vertical division. In consideration of these two types of social divisions, we conceptualized new concepts to clarify and examine actual ongoing situations. They are: INDIVIDUATED PRIVATIZATION (IP) and ORIENTED INDIVIDUATED PRIVATIZATION (OIP).
Among many variables around “privatization” and “individuation”, we focused primarily on “affection” and “individualism in general attitudes”. The principal findings are as follows:
1. While the observed was the highly oriented familial privatization that shows a preference for the family over the external systems, it has almost nothing to do with the attitudes which make for the importance of affectional ties in couples/families.
2. “IP” is not preferably oriented so much as being discussed in general, in families with “highly OIP”, the clearly weaker affectional ties in couples/families are detected relatively out of proportion.
3. “OIP” has no relevance to individualism, with some exceptions. It is thus plausible to say that the spreading of and the deepening of individualism is the trigger resulting in individuation of the family in Japan, but, although the exception, there are some corvariational relationships between “OIP” and individualism. This may perhaps be an indication of some changes occurring within the current Japanese family.

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It is often discussed that the degradation of farming, seen in such phenomena as part-time farming, the aging population and depopulation, may result in the dissolution of farm families and the rural community. Our initial hypothesis was that the differentiation whithin farm households caused by the rapid introduction of machines will individuate the members, disrupt the socialization of younger members and result in the dissolution of farm families. However, the process of dissolution should be questioned.
A panel study on time-use conducted at a rural community in Okayama prefecture enables the comparison of the life-patterns of farm families before and after the mechanization. After mechanization, time-use patterns become differentiated by generation and sex. Younger members have gained private spheres, while the aged are left with old norms. The farm family is now the arena of competing norms.
Under such a situation as individuation, the dissolution of a farm family could be prevented if the process of socialization takes place not as a molding process but as a process of an inter-generational negotiation.

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In relation to the uniqueness of Japanese family and kinship relations, most Japanese sociologists have supported such a hypothesis, associating household sharing with the husband's parents.
We tested some propositions associated with this hypothesis, based on data collected through an interview type questionaire from a total of 1531 randomly sampled respondents who were married, who lived in one of the three following cities-Sapporo, Sendai and Fukuoka-and who were between 27 and 76 years old in 1982-86.
First, our data does not support the neetheory hypothesis except in a few spheres of interaction i Sapporo and Fukuoka.
Second, asymmetrical aspects of intergenerational ties were analysed. Economic assistance was to some extent associated with some items that were emphasized in relation to the husband's parents (son's family). However, many more items which emphasized the wife's parents (daughter's family) were found, and these itemswere generally associated with the woman's role and the closeness of mother-daughter ties.
Third, although there was some variation in attitudes toward household sharing among the three cities, young people tended to prefer living separately. The fact that many female respondents had negative attitudes towards living together with the husband's parents suggests a decrease in the number of such couples living with their husband's parents.Sonoko, Kumagai

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This paper attempts to integrate the method of social history into family sociology and to develop macroscopic and historical perspectives of family sociology, which seems to have been more interested in the microscopic aspects.
It is true that social history gives important effects to family sociology, but unfortunately there seems to be some confusion, because they differ in the way of defining “modernity” and family in modern times. This paper clarifies such confusion, and points out problems in the concept of the “modern family” used in the fields of family sociology, by using the results of historical study about the family in modern Japan. And then theoretical sophistication is suggested in order to apply the social historical approach to sociology.

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This study examines the social factors that affect distress (depression) of male core members of the family on stem-family system (head of household/heir apparent) in urban areas of contemporary Japan. As the result of analysis using socio-demographic variables, three effects were found : direct effects of the household income and of the position in the household (head of household/heir apparent), and interaction effects of marital status (married/unmarried) by the position in the household.
Direct effect indicates that lower household income and the position of an heir apparent increase distress, and interaction effect indicates that the existence of a spouse decreases distress when one is head of a household, and also increases distress when one is an heir apparent. The effect of the household income could be explained with the previous explanatory model in the United States. Finally, the effect of the position in the household and the interaction effect were discussed from the point of view of 1) informal relationships within a household, 2) inter-generational conflicts within a household, 3) and the power structure within the context of the household structure of the traditional stem-family system in Japan.

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This study focuses on working mothers who are likely to experience role overload and strains as main prpviders of child care, and explores their gender orientations and informal social networks providing assistance in child care. Data were collected in 1989 using a sample of 213 mothers of nursery school children living in the Osaka metropolitan area. Mothers' gender orientations are hypothesized to affect their relationships with informal helpers in child care.
Some key findings were as follows:
(1) Factor analysis of ISRO (Index of Sex Role Orientation) found four factors : “division of labor by sex, ” “women being responsible for running their homes, ” “reversal of sex roles, ” “women building their careers.”
(2) A higher level of instrumental support from the husband was found among mothers who internalized less the traditional sex role norms associated with “division of labor by sex” and/or “women being responsible for running their homes.”
(3) A higher level of informational and emotional support from husbands' kin was found among mothers who internalized less the traditional sex role norms associated with “women being responsible for running their homes.”
(4) A higher level of emotional and informational support from friends at nursery school was found among mothers who internalized less the traditional sex role norms associated with “division of labor by sex” and/or “women being responsible for running their homes.”
It is concluded that for mothers, less traditional gender ideology may faciliate stronger child care support from their husbands and the non-kin network.

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The purpose of this paper is to analyze changes in post-war Japanese families from the point of view of family ideology primarily based on the results of various nation-wide public-opinion polls from 1950 to 1990.
The major findings are the following :
1. The norm for succession from parent to child in the three areas of social status, wealth, and religious rites has changed from succession by one particular person (the heir) as the rule to a norm that dose not require succession by a child.
2. Regarding the care of elderly parents, decrease in three areas were observed ; (1) those who wished to depend on children in their old age ; (2) those who assumed parental support as a custom or duty ; (3) those who believed that the aged should live with their children. Therefore the view of succession of the “ie” as a necessity for the support of elderly parents seems to be declining.
3. Though attitudes toward gender-role differentiation have changed a great deal, husbands' participation in household chores and child care was quite limited.
4. In the 1960s, those who supported the stem family system became fewer than those who support the conjugal family system.

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