The purpose of this paper is to describe the views for marriage among unmarried youths in contemporary Japan, using the unmarried respondents' part of the Tenth Japanese National Fertility Survey carried out on July 1992.
Major findings are as follows;
(1) Concerning the desired marriage type, i.e., love match or not, which is the desirable for young unmarried respondents, two thirds of unmarried males and seven tenths of unmarried females prefer love match as the process of marriage formation. There are significant changes in level of the preferences by ages of the unmarried. Younger the unmarried person, more prefer the love match. When the age goes over the modal age of marriage, now the unmarried do not prefer the love match as before.
(2) As the age of the unmarried rise, the desired age at marriage also goes up, but slower pace than the age of them. As for the desired age gap between spouses, whereas the unmarried male always desire young and marriage modal aged female as a spouse, the unmarried female tends to wish the two or three years senior spouse at any time.
(3) The greatest concern of Unmarried for the desirable properties of their future spouse is good personality, the same as for both sex respondents. The next major concerns of females are mainly economic power and status of the spouse such as earnings and occupation. The following concerns of females are so many as the good looking, the family relationship and the educational attainments of their future spouse. The next concern of male respondents, in contrast with those of females, is almost only the good looking of the spouse.
(4) Women's future life courses are classified into some categories by following criterions, getting married or not, having job and continuing her business in parallel with their marriage life or not, having children or not. The majority of unmarried females think the following two are the desirable life courses for women. The first is sengyou-shufu course (that of housewives or women marries and has children without any outside job). The second is sai-shuushoku course (that of women marry, once retire their outside job, bear and rear their children, then restart their outside job). The above two courses are based on three tenths of female respondents respectively. Concerning to their prospective estimations on their actual life courses, sai-shuushohu is in the ratio of almost half and sengyou-shufu is based on one fifth of female respondents. Half of male respondents hope for female choice of sai-shuushohu, and one third of male hope for those of sengyou-shufu.
(5) Two thirds of male respondents want to live their own parents after the marriage, and the two thirds of those want is not the coresidence of immediately after the marriage but somewhat later. Proportion of those want to live their parents immediately after the marriage is one fifth of male respondents. Postmarital coresidence with one's parents is more popular among the male respondents with the following characteristics: junior high-school graduate, agriculture engaged, self-management, and that family relationship of an only son or the eldest son. One third of female respondents want to avoid the coresidence with their future spouse's parents.