ss47k: You japan is expensive to raise children but how can you explain the article below I won't get married! Over tea in the sunlit lobby of the Akasaka Prince Hotel near the Imperial Palace in downtown Tokyo, and later over soba noodles and chicken yakatori at a nearby restaurant, Japanese writer and television personality Yoko Haruka describes the shortcomings of love and marriage Japanese-style. The husband works long hours and carouses into the night with his pals from work. The wife is expected to stay home, clean house and take care of kids. If the children behave badly, she's a bad mother. If her husband has an affair, she's a bad wife. The author of Kekkon Shimasen (I Won't Get Married!), Haruka abandoned her own plans for marriage a decade ago when she realized her fiancé wanted her to give up her career and lead the traditional life of a Japanese housewife. She says Japanese men sometimes propose to women with lines like: "I want you to cook miso soup for me the rest of my life." Not surprisingly, Japan's increasingly educated and well-traveled young women are not impressed. "I'm not expecting men will change," Haruka says. Her assistant, Miho Higuchi, who has kept silent throughout the conversation, suddenly blurts out: "Never again!" A mother of three, she divorced her husband because he refused to do anything to help her clean house and take care of the kids. In fact, Japan's divorce rate rose steadily to 2.3 divorces for every 1,000 people in 2002 from 1.3 in 1990; it appears to have dropped a bit last year, partly because fewer people have been getting married. (The divorce rate in the USA was 4 per 1,000 people in 2002. ) As for men, they seem bewildered by the rising assertiveness of Japanese women. "Men are getting weaker," says Takayuki Tokiwa, 23, a student at a Tokyo vocational college. "Women don't have to rely on men anymore. They can live on their own." Masahito Wakauchi, 24, would seem to be a good catch. He has fashionably wavy hair and a good job with an advertising agency in Tokyo. Is he dating? Wakauchi shakes his head sadly. "It's very, very difficult" to meet women these days, he says. Rather than risk rejection or summon the energy to maintain a modern relationship, many Japanese men simply pay for affection in the country's ubiquitous hostess bars and brothels. Others prefer virtual women online to the real kind. "They seem to find the relationship cumbersome. ... You have to be attentive to your partner," says Kunio Kitamura, president of the Japan Family Planning Association's Family Planning Clinic. "A quick way to get satisfaction is so-called cybersex." In fact, as many as a million young men — mostly teenagers, but increasingly older men as well — suffer from what is known here as hikikomori. It's a condition in which they seclude themselves in their rooms for weeks at a time (though the causes seem to go well beyond fear of women to traumatic experiences from the past, such as being bullied at school). But most young Japanese seem to enjoy the single life. In 1973, a Japanese government survey found that the happiest people in the country were those over age 60. A similar survey 24 years later found that the happiest people were in their 20s, and twentysomething women were the happiest of all: 77.7% said they were content with their lives. Maybe Gloria Steinem was right: Women need men like fish need bicycles. Many young Japanese women live carefree lives, staying at home with their parents, paying little if any rent, letting their mothers cook their meals, clean their rooms and do their laundry. Many work dead-end jobs that don't pay much but don't cause much stress and give them enough spending money to buy designer handbags, shoes, clothes and jewelry and enough time to take overseas holidays with their girlfriends. Emerging from the Louis Vuitton shop on Namikibashi street in the heart of the Ginza shopping district, Tokyo secretary Yukiko Matsumoto, 38, says she's happily single and living at home with herparents. "I don't want to change my rhythms," she says. "Men expect women to stay home and take care of them." Not likely: Matsumoto travels abroad twice a year with her best friend and shopping companion, Terumi Yanagibashi, 38. They've already been to Hawaii together three times. Also if you have time you can rad this news as well http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3694230.stm Same sort of reasons why women in Taiwan and Korea are not getting maried as well. Prem Charo,flip flop and SS74k I was just giving examples of Chinese babies. What I meant to say was adoptin in general with single women is increasing. Its your coice who you want to adopt, chinese, Nepalise, Africans, Guatemalans, Russians.... its up to you. i was just trying to give example. Yes I also agree that women want to have their own children but what can you do when the women is not able to find a man who treats her equally. I also found out that lots of single black women in Careers are preferring adoptions over marriage.(Reference:http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1077/is_1_61/ai_n15770853) People might think I am stupid / crazy but I have a point and i know that for sure.