Not only do these girls tend not to work and therefore have time to get one, they also have parents who can afford the costs and are probably more likely to fork out in order to save face. After investing so much money into their daughter’s education, what is a couple of man to make sure that she doesn’t ruin it all and still manages to marry a lawyer? A yankii’s parents wouldn’t care for they themselves would have had children at the same age.

Considering how many Japanese youth live with their parents, having children young does not seem so difficult, especially if one has not only a mother, but also a grandmother to help with childrearing.

What is most interesting about this new trend is that it is very urban – these are gyaru in Tokyo, not yankiis in Gunma. These girls may in fact be doing all the hard work by themselves in a tiny 1dk and then working as a hostess at night to mangae both expensive rent and the 109 look for 2.

“At least in my understanding, the unplanned and hasty move into parenthood has always been a major part of Japanese rural working-class culture.”

“Japanese society has dropped all pretense of being a nation of universal middle-class sexual values.”

Since all of the above are inventions of the high-growth period that lingered into the 1990s, I think that what we are seeing now is a combination of commercialized polish (once reserved for the massification of Taisho middle class culture and is now falling along with depato) and fast 風土 with prewar styles of community organization (rural village youth organization or collections of young people around an urban nagaya – always pretty randy).

In extreme examples, I think that we can also compare the motives for having children on the part of Japanese young people who don’t see a whole lot of hope for a prosperous future and the sorts of motives on the part of inner city Americans that David Simon explored in “The Corner” (it gives a boy some respect as a man and allows him to move into the the man’s sphere which in Japan, if you wanted to be really cynical about it, would be work, drinking, and 風俗; for a girl it suddenly gives her real social place, something not likely to be found in a crappy konbini baito after high school and if it is combined with a layer of media posh, all the better).

Or do they want kids sooner? I mean, if you get out of high school and just have a lifetime of shitty jobs ahead of you, what does it matter if you have kids now or wait a few years? Ok, I can come up with some reasons to wait still, but I could understand women who just don’t see the benefit of waiting. Especially if you are pregnant already by accident, it’s not so hard to say “Why not?” and have the kid. Upper class women are probably more likely to have things they want to do before they have kids.

That said, I will never understand Japanese aversion to birth control. Even if you don’t think abortion is a big deal morally, from what I understand it’s still physically a bad time and you have to take time off of work/school and stuff.