Based on 25 interviews with educated and employed never-married men in Japan, this article examines how the diminished social norm to marry by a certain age, never-married men's beliefs regarding gender in marriage, and the value these men place on individual autonomy all contribute to a trend in late marriage. We argue that the diminished social pressure to marry and the changing age norm do further men's ambivalence toward marriage by allowing them to rationalize their detachment from the idea of their future marriage, their aversion to the perceived gender constraints of marriage, and the emphasis they place on their autonomy. However, we also argue that the weakening of the social pressure to marry does not relate to changes in employed men's gendered views of marriage, which remain traditional.

Female empowerment is a prerequisite for a just and sustainable developed society. Being the most developed non-western country, Japan offers an instructive window onto concerns about gender worldwide. Although overall gender equality is advancing in Japan, difficulties remain, especially in achieving equality in the workplace. We draw on theories of ontological commitment and the psychology of fiction to critically analyse the role of popular culture -in this case manga -in the reproduction of gender inequality in the Japanese workplace. We present examples of four of the most popular mainstream manga aimed at working men and women in Japan and show how women are depicted. We argue that the hyper-mediated fictional realism of representative tropes generates an ontological commitment to characters and narratives among consumers that reinforces the reproduction of a culturally exceptionalist national political economic space, one of whose essential defining characteristics is a gendered workplace. Our research suggests important implications for researching the relationship between culture, in all its forms, and spatial variation in persistent institutional biases among varieties of capitalism.

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