現代日本研究センター　若手研究者フォーラム

現代日本研究センター セミナーシリーズ

<Title>
Marriage-hunting and gendered governance in contemporary Japan

<Speaker>
Anna Woźny
Joint postdoctoral fellow at Tokyo College and Princeton University

<Moderator>
Sawako SHIRAHASE
Director of TCJS

<Abstract>
Commercial dating services known as marriage-hunting (konkatsu) constitute a multi-billion-yen industry and are an increasingly popular means of finding a romantic partner in Japan. In this talk I explore how the marriage-hunting market attracts clients by promising self-betterment, self-actualization, and partnership at a time when marriage has ostensibly become optional. Drawing on my ethnographic study of marriage-hunting services and nearly 130 interviews with market professionals and clients, I demonstrate that these discourses target primarily young women, a population increasingly likely to eschew marriage and childbearing. By linking these commercial discourses to various projects of social management through family and gender relations by the Japanese state, I argue that marriage-hunting represents a new mode of gendered governance in which marketized intimacy becomes one of the many hands of the state.

<About the speaker>
Anna Woźny (pronounced ヴォジュニ) is a joint postdoctoral fellow at Tokyo College and Princeton University.
She received her doctorate in sociology from the University of Michigan in 2023. Her research focuses on contemporary Japanese society and analyzes how changes in the political economy shape and are shaped by the shifting conceptions of gender and family.
Her research on marriage-hunting was supported by the ACLS/Mellon Foundation and the Japan Foundation.
An article based on this research was published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.
She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Marriage-hunting: Markets, Morals and Marriageability in Contemporary Japan.