Joyce,

Sorry if the graphs are hard to discern. You can expand them by clicking on them.

The data are from the annual version of the monthly labor survey. I didn't save the URL but you can google the table titles. I normally start at the government statistics portal (http://www.stat.go.jp) which is much better indexed in Japanese. With few exceptions all of the actual data carry English headings. See also the IPSS site (the Natl Inst of Pop & Soc Security Research http://www.ipss.go.jp/).

長期時系列表３ （２）年齢階級(５歳階級)別労働
力人口及び労働力人口比率 － 全国
Historical data 3 　(2) Labour force and labour force participation rate by age group - Whole Japan

There are stats on age of first marriage and year of first child. Both are increasing, and you can get data on what percent of a given age bracket have married, ditto when they had their first child. What I don't know (remember) is whether there are cross-tabulations of work and marriage. No time to look today, or to post graphs on marriage and fertility that I did (?) 5 years ago.

The muting of the M-curve has been going on 30 years, a little bit at a time. LF participation by 25-29 year olds hit its nadir at 43% in 1975. It hit 50% in 1981, 60% in 1989, 70% in 2000 and in 2012 was at 78%. (This is the heavier green line here, http://newjapanforum.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/female
lfjikeiretsu1.png). That's a 35 percentage point shift.

Participation for the 30-34 bracket was at 50% in 1986, hit 60% in 2002 and 2012 was at 69%.

Until 2001 participation was highest in the 20-24 age bracket, but since then it's been the 25-29 bracket (I presume due to the greater number of women in 4-year colleges -- 75% in some sort of post-secondary education, including the surviving tandai and a huge array of trade schools).

Now the gap between 25-29 and 30-34 was been fairly steady during 1995-2005 (about 12%, the depth of the
"M") but is now at 9%. The "M" has by no means vanished, but it is different, and except at the oldest and youngest age brackets ("retirement" and
"schooling"??) participation is higher at every age.

mike smitka
washington and lee
http://smitka.academic.wlu.edu

PS But I did at least check the 人口統計資料集 at IPSS, only eyeballing data, it has marriage data by 5-year brackets - for 2010 (the most recent date in some
tables) 35% of women age 30-34 had yet to marry. That was 9% in 1980, so to my mind that's a pretty big shift over roughly a generation. One in six women age 40-44 have yet to marry; that's a significant number if we're interested in fertility. On that front Table 4-25 notes that until 2002 the total number of children per married woman was steady at 2.2 through 2002. It's now down to 2.0. To me that's an implication of delayed marriage -- survey data (I've forgetten the source, something done once every 3-5 years?) showed the desired number of children constant at 2.0 since (from
memory) 1960. In the past women were able to achieve that target, on average (enough women went on to have
3+ children to offset those who failed to hit 2). Now
on average women are no longer hitting their target. [I treat men as passive players in all this, though at some point, for 5 minutes or so...]