Marriage-hunting: Markets, Morals, and Marriageability in Contemporary Japan

Abstract

This dissertation examines the entanglement of moral and market values in the commercial heterosexual dating services in Japan known as “marriage-hunting.” In Japan, marriage is widely regarded as a precondition for reproduction and hence the national government has endorsed this industry to counteract ongoing population decline. This research draws on multiple types of qualitative data collected over nine months of multi-site fieldwork in Japan between 2018 and 2020: 1) ethnographic observations of dozens of marriage-hunting events, including educational seminars and group dating events; 2) nearly 130 interviews with professionals organizing spouse-seeking activities and their clients; 3) documentary evidence including contracts, marketing materials, self-help books, and advice columns.

Engaging macro- (structural), meso- (institutional), and micro- (individual) level analyses, I examine how political and economic transformations spawned diverse marriage-hunting services and, in turn, how individuals respond to the demands of marriageability as filtered through the market. The first empirical chapter shows why and how institutions mediating marriage in modern Japan have evolved in relation to shifting structural conditions, new ideals of family and personhood, and women’s improving social standing. Chapter 3 then turns to marriage-hunting professionals’ gendered conceptions of marriageability and shows how they cast marriage-hunting as a means for self-betterment. Chapter 4 analyzes the varied modalities of mediation that marriage-hunting services provide. Intensive mediation supplants clients’ cultural fluency by orchestrating and disambiguating all steps of the courtship process, moderate mediation enhances their ability to enact courtship scripts, while weak mediation requires participants to mobilize their own cultural fluency. The final two chapters consider how everyday people respond to ideals of marriageability: Chapter 5 demonstrates that marriage-hunting necessitates performances of hybrid masculinity and femininity, which, despite appearing progressive, ultimately reproduce hierarchical gender relations. By centering the voices of sexual minorities and individuals marginalized in the market, Chapter 6 further analyzes moral boundaries drawn around marriageability and probes the limits of the state-market nexus in shaping intimate lives and subjectivities.

Marriage-hunting: Markets, Morals, and Marriageability in Contemporary Japan sheds much needed light on how intimacy, markets, and politics intersect. First, it demonstrates how new dating industries become a means of moral regulation by implicating personal goals and desires in state reproduction. The marriage-hunting industry mobilizes ideals of individualism, free choice, competition, and meritocracy to encourage everyday people—especially women—to partake in spouse-seeking activities. By providing a fine-grained account that fleshes out statistical representations of Japanese men and women which can be found in the demographic literature on marriage, my ethnographic approach allows me to demonstrate diverse self-making projects as individuals negotiate, resist, or strategically incorporate state and market discourses. Second, by attending to the different ways women and men are valued and expected to move through the market I reveal the gendered cultural logics that underpin new dating technologies. Specifically, I develop a theoretical framework for understanding hybrid femininities and masculinities and consider their significance for the broader gender order. Finally, my research contributes to scholarly debates surrounding the commodification of intimacy. By attending to experiences of those both at the center and on the margins of the marriage-hunting market, I demonstrate that the peril of commodification lies not in its potential to corrupt intimate bonds. Rather, when individual life chances are tethered to commercial services to which no equal access exists, intimate markets become a mechanism of social and symbolic exclusion.