"Intimate Separations: Divorce and its Reverberations in Contemporary Japan," is an ethnographic study of experiences of divorce in Japan. It analyzes how people are negotiating romantic and familial relationships, independence, and standards of maturity in an era when marital dissolution is ever more common. Over the modern century, official pronouncements, popular talk, and academic formulations of the Japanese national community have centered on images of the family, both metaphorically as a national or corporate family and literally as the families formed by mainstream norms. Yet in recent decades, both the family construct and families as the framework of mainstream life have changed significantly. Statistical predictions that over thirty percent of Japanese marriages in 2003 will end in divorce attest to the enormous importance of understanding the incidence, process, and variety of divorce experiences.
Divorce experiences are shaped by Japanese ideologies linking social maturity to marriage and parenthood, which renders "divorced" (batsu ichi) status a charged and ambivalent category. On the other hand, ideals of romance and self-fulfillment that have long motivated "love" marriages now justify their dissolutions. My research suggests that notions of "acceptable" divorces are being challenged by two recent patterns: first, the rising numbers of divorces involving young children and, second, commonly accepted predictions that the rate of "middle-aged divorce" (jukunen rikon) will skyrocket after April 2007. Divorce can be experienced as an empowering choice or an act of desperation, and thus the topic reveals how Japanese individuals, couples, and families are negotiating personal choice and family change.