Single moms and Japan: a raw deal

I saw online recently that Japan is looking to adopt policies that would assist single mothers, particularly around securing child support from fathers. The article noted that a survey conducted in 2016 from the welfare ministry showed only 24.3 percent of single-mother households in Japan received child support from fathers after divorce. It also made mention of the fact that women in Japan earn significantly less than their male counterparts, and many single mothers work in temporary or contract positions - not a great thing for job security.

Reading this sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole of research about how hard it is for single mothers in Japan. I'm not nullifying the struggles of single dads here, either - just merely looking at some of the unique challenges that single mothers here face that men are often exempt from.

Parenthood provides numerous challenges at the best of times, but single mothers in Japan face some additional ones. Artwork by Uemura Shoen / Public Domain

This article published by The Atlantic has a stark and somewhat blunt headline, but it seems to encapsulate the circumstance: "Japan is No Place for Single Mothers". The article noted something I wasn't previously aware of - Japanese law doesn't have a provision for joint custody, so mothers often end up caring for children full time. Many mothers who find themselves having to rejoin the workforce after a divorce end up finding themselves in low paying jobs, because they've been out of the workforce caring for their child (or children) for several years. The statistic that alarmed me the most from the article though was this one: The poverty rate of single parent-families where the parent is working is 56 percent, which is also the highest in the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).

That article was from 2017, though - has anything changed since then? Not really. This piece from just a few days ago highlights how single mothers have been doing it even tougher as a result of COVID-19. The juggling act of managing children when schools were closed is hard enough when your partner or spouse lives under the same roof, or if you're lucky enough to have supportive family nearby. But what if you don't? Your child doesn't have school to go to, but you still somehow have to work to put food on the table and a roof over your heads - an incredibly difficult scenario to be faced with.

With the number of single-mother households in Japan having risen by 72 percent between 1983 and 2011, I can only hope that the government's plans to meaningfully assist them isn't just lip service.