Fertility in Japan dropped below replacement level in the middle of the 1970s and declined further since the middle of the 1980s, having reached the total fertility rate (TFR) of 1.42 in 1995. There is much evidence to show that such fertility decline occurred directly as the result of the rise in the proportion never married and the rise in the age at marriage and age at childbearing. In this article the author tries to examine whether value change hypotheses as proposed for explaining below replacement fertility in the West are applicable to the fertility decline in Japan. According to various nationally representative time-series and comparable attitudinal surveys which have been undertaken in the post-war period by various institutes, there has hardly been any dramatic change in attitude toward religion and only a moderate change from social conformism toward indi-vidualistic attitude over the last 40 years. In contrast, there has been a tremendous attitudinal change related to womenfs social and family roles, in such areas as premarital sex, divorce, gender-role division, and the care of elderly parents, espe-cially since the middle of the 1980s. All these survey results suggest that the rapid rise in the proportion never married in Japan in this latest decade can be related to the change in the value system regarding womenfs social and familial role and status, a change toward the valuation of a gender equal society, rather than to secular individuation or the end of a child-centered society.
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