Despite the indication that the financial burden of childrearing and gender disparity are closely linked to birth behavior, previous studies in Japan have not provided consistent results. The purpose of the present study is to investigate in what context couples choose to have their second child by focusing on life changes the couples face after the first childbirth. Data used for this study was the first ten waves of the Japanese Life Course Panel Study. A series of discrete-time hazard models was employed to estimate determinants of the second childbirth hazard for 629 married men and women who experienced their first childbirth. The results showed that high educational expectations strongly pushed down the second childbirth hazard when the husband's annual income was low. In addition, the second childbirth hazard was high when the frequency of wife-report husband's housework was high for a wife with flexible gender role attitudes and when a husband took childcare leave at the birth of first child. At the same time, simply equalizing gender roles between husband and wife does not necessarily increase fertility rates, indicating that deep-rooted gender structure in the family realm is surprisingly solid in Japan. 1 本

This note explains the indexes of evaluating websites of village assemblies in Japan. The indexes consist of 8 items which cover functionality, linkage to local government, web accessibility, information access, information items, assembly members information, DX, and resident friendliness. We aim to publish the indexes for general uses such as evaluating and analyzing the political accountability of 183 village assemblies in Japan.

This paper examines whether good websites of local assemblies affect civic engagement across villages in Japan. Employing our website indexes, which are introduced in Part I, we cluster all 183 village assemblies into 7 groups and compare voter turnouts and sign-up rates of volunteer fire companies across 7 groups. Next, we hypothesize that the effects of websites of local assemblies on voter turnouts vary across its population sizes. The results suggest that the relationship between websites of local assemblies and civic engagement depends on the population sizes and the municipalities. Further research should take this into consideration.