More Japanese Women Put Marriage on Hold, Adopt Other Priorities : Family: More young women decide that housework and children are not for them. Education, a job and having fun come first.

Rieko Tanaka has it all: a good career, a nice boyfriend, a busy social life--and no plans to marry and settle down.

“I haven’t proved myself yet in my job,” says Tanaka, 24, a reporter for a Japanese newspaper. “If I got married, I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on my work.”

She’s not alone in thinking this way. More and more Japanese women are deciding that marriage to a hard-working, company-minded man, and being almost solely responsible for doing housework and raising children, isn’t for them.

Instead, Japan’s urban women are concentrating more than ever before on building careers, furthering their education and--perhaps most daring of all--having fun.

According to the Health and Welfare Ministry’s Institute of Population Problems, the average age at which Japanese women are marrying has climbed to a record high of 27, a jump of nearly two years from a decade ago.

The country’s birthrate, meanwhile, continues to fall--to a record low 1.53 babies per woman in 1991, compared to 2.14 in 1965.

“The family system in Japan is experiencing an earthquake,” says Yasuhei Honma, a sociology professor at Tokyo’s Rikkyo University. “Women are pursuing careers. They have no way to look after a family.”

Honma says a new-found interest in higher education is behind the trend. In the past, he says, most Japanese women ended their academic studies with high school, or at most two years at a junior college. The priority, he says, was to find a man and settle down.

Now, Honma observes, more women are attending four-year universities, earning degrees and seeking jobs with companies that offer long-term prospects for advancement. They are no longer content to serve merely as office tea-servers or receptionists.

One recent government survey found that among Japanese women in their late 20s, only 29.4 percent with high school educations remained single, compared to 51.3 percent of those who had finished college.

A separate study by the Mitsubishi Research Institute, a private think tank, found that nearly three-quarters of Japanese married women in their 20s missed the pleasures of being single. The same was true of more than half of married women in their 30s and 40s.

One trend that has threatened Japanese men is the “ oyaji gals,” young women in their early 20s who pursue traditionally male pastimes such as golf, pinball and late evenings drinking with friends. Oyaji means one’s boss or superior.

Another shock to the men is the “yellow cabs,” a name applied to the thousands of young women who go overseas each year seeking sexual relations with foreign men. Their nickname is based on the assumption that they’re easy to pick up.

In a best-selling book, journalist Shoko Ieda profiled a number of “yellow cabs” living in New York. One of her subjects, “Yoshiko,” was quoted as saying, “I’m enjoying what I can’t do in Japan, because I won’t be able to fool around like this when I go back.”

“Men are still seeking a fantasy of marrying a woman who will take care of them,” Yoshiya Soeda, a sociologist at Tsukuba University, says. “But of course women don’t want that.”

In the past, Soeda says, Japanese men and women married at the prescribed age--about 22--regardless of whether they actually cared for their spouse. Traditional matchmaking was concerned with pairing everyone off, not with helping people fall in love.

“Even if you had doubts about your partner, you still got married,” Soeda says. “Now you can delay for as long as you like.”

One result is that as more Japanese women travel the globe searching for fun, more Japanese men remain single and, because of high rents in major cities, live with their parents.

“Men haven’t changed,” Soeda says. “They still think marriage is something you do because it’s convenient. So if they can’t get a wife to look after them, they will stay with their mothers.”

Those who venture in search of a mate need deep pockets. A recent survey by a Tokyo bank found that men in the city spent an average of $250 each time they wooed a prospective partner. Some well-heeled men claimed that they spent as much as $4,000 on a single date.

As Japanese women become pickier, Honma notes, more men are abandoning the chase altogether and turning to brides from other Asian countries such as the Philippines and Thailand.