The purpose of the present paper is to describe findings from a survey on attitudes toward marriage and family among Japanese never-married youth from the point view of the general framework of the demand and supply system. The survey was conducted as a part of the Tenth Japanese National Fertility Survey on the first of July in 1992 by the Institute of Population Problems, with effective sample sizes of never-married population aged 15-34 as 4215 for male and 3647 for female.
Major conclusive findings regarding attitudes toward marriage are as follows:
1) The norm of universal marriage seems to be slightly weakening, while 90% of the never married still have the intention to marry in the course of their lives. 2) The norm of marriageable age has weakened, and people increasingly prefer to delay marriage and to look for ideal spouses. 3) Never-married youth are less ready to marry as compared with the results of the previous survey for the same age groups. 1)-3) indicate that the demand for marriage among Japanese youth seems to have declined both in course of life and for the present, but more clearly for the latter. 4) 50 percent of the men and two fifths of the women have no friend of the opposite sex. 5) Opportunity to become acquainted with a friend of the opposite sex is limited to a few occasions like "at the office", "at school", and "through siblings and friends". 6) The majority claims that there are some obstacles to getting married even if they (would) have already found ideal prospective spouses. Economic difficulties are among the leading obstacles. The situation in 4)-6) is quite similar to those from the previous survey, which means that the supply condition of marriage for individuals has scarcely improved in recent years. Finally, reasons to be (still) single were directly asked and the answers are classified into two categories; reasons related to demand (do not want to get married), and reasons related to supply (want to get married but situation does not allow it). 7) Importance of the reasons related to supply condition increases as age proceeds, which indicates that single people increasingly conceive difficulties to get married as getting older. 8) But reasons related to the demand factor, i.e. reasons for low motivation to get married, remain substantially as a second or third reason even in age groups over 30 years of age.
The results described above as a whole indicate that never-married people in Japan are in a kind of paradoxical situation in which they complain about such difficulties to marry as insufficient availability of prospective spouses, while they have weaker motivation to get married. In other words, they find the supply condition of marriage defective and have the weak demand for getting married at the same time. This situation can possibly be explained by increasing level of expectation for marriage and spouse due to dynamic change in conceived function of marriage. According to answers to a question about costs and benefits of marriage, the purpose of marriage seems to become more individualistic, while practical needs for marriage are diminishing. Consequently the relative mental cost of marriage as compared with remaining single has increased.