36 Hiding Fatherhood in Corporate Japan Scott North, Osaka University Theories of family change in industrial nations posit complex linkages between the market economy and the interpersonal emotional economy at home and at work (Chafetz 1996; Goode 1963; Hochschild 1989). Although most research has focused on motherhood, modernity’s undeniable transformative effects on twentieth-century fatherhood are equally significant (LaRossa 1997). Locally, family changes and gender roles are influenced by historically derived, durable, and more or less habitually deployed cultural strategies of social action (Swidler 1986). Normative practices in most societies limit fathers’ caregiving, but close examination reveals various innovations in fathers’ responses to the dual-career, post–industrial division of labor and rising economic uncertainty associated with today’s increasingly globalized mode of production. Guided by these two theoretical premises about the effects of post–industrial modernity on family life and the importance of local culture in social change, this chapter explores contemporary Japanese fatherhood, focusing on parental leave-taking. The Japanese example of modern fatherhood sheds light on powerful work-family conflicts arising between fathers’ increased desire for family involvement, inadequate national policy provisions, and market- driven, corporate practices. Although the reality of fathering lags behind the rhetoric (Nakatani 2006), caring fatherhood and paternity leave are promoted in Japan’s recent family policy reforms. Moreover, they are acquiring cachet among working Japanese women, who want husbands to be partners in parenting as well as breadwinning, Male willingness and ability to do family work is becoming social capital readily convertible in Japan’s marriage market, just as in Europe (Breen and Cooke