Urban Couple Feel a Family Would Spoil Their Fun

On a blustery Saturday afternoon, Sakiko and Hiromi Ono are out bikini shopping.

Never mind that Sakiko, a 34-year-old graphic designer, already owns 30 of them. The Onos are about to leave for another exotic holiday--a snorkeling vacation in the Maldives. This bikini pilgrimage is a ritual they perform before each trip, just to get into the mood.

Inside Seashell Pink, Sakiko’s favorite bikini store, the music and flowers are tropical. After some delicious deliberation, Sakiko plunks down $80 for two bikinis in up-to-the-minute animal prints. Hiromi, also 34, picks up two new T-shirts.

The Onos have been married 10 years and are obviously still in love. Children do not figure in their plans. Life is good--far better than their parents or grandparents could have imagined. A baby would mean kissing it all goodbye.

When asked whether she wants a child, Sakiko gives the standard, polite Japanese answer that means “not yet.” Surveys find that only about 8% of Japanese feel--or admit to feeling--they do not want children at all.

But for more and more Japanese couples, especially urbanites, “not yet” is turning into “never.” They are marrying later and spending longer sampling the many delights of one of the world’s most affluent consumer lifestyles. Couples like the Onos don’t see a way to have it all with a baby on board.

Judged by the traditions of their culture, the Onos are social revolutionaries--not because they don’t want children, but because the goal of their life is pleasure.

“I’m working in order to play,” Sakiko declares calmly. “My work suits me, and I want to continue to work my whole life, but the content of my work isn’t really that interesting.”

Hiromi does computer-assisted quality control engineering for a plastics manufacturer. Unlike most salarymen, he usually comes home by 6 p.m., 8 p.m. at the latest. Then he and Sakiko watch TV, hang out in cafes or tend to their five tanks of tropical fish. She visits a gym, and he plays pachinko, a pinball-like game.

They recently traded in their four-wheel-drive van for a Toyota bB, a boxy, funky new minivan that is one of the hottest-selling vehicles in Japan. They often spend weekends visiting hot springs or just exploring.

But most of their time, money and attention go into their real passion: trips to tropical islands. They go three times a year, and their destinations are places most of the planet can only dream about: the Maldives, New Caledonia, Tahiti, Phuket, Bali, the Seychelles, Jamaica, Cancun, Anguilla, Hawaii, Lang Tengah, Borocay. This summer, the Onos are planning an African safari.

After each trip, Sakiko compiles elaborate albums documenting every glorious aspect: the luxury hotels, the unspoiled beaches, the gourmet dinners by candlelight and the underwater photos from snorkeling. This winter, the Onos bought a $1,000 Canon camera--the better to chronicle their adventures.

Hiromi says he is certain that he won’t regret not having children.

“I want to keep traveling, even when I get old,” he says. “Foreigners always seem to take their kids everywhere, and I guess that would be OK. But we have freedom and space, and we want to have fun.”

The Onos’ focus on personal satisfaction and marital love would have seemed incomprehensible or downright immoral to generations of Japanese whose lives were ruled by duty to family, lord and country, and the struggle for survival.

Sakiko hasn’t told her parents that she doesn’t think she wants children. They haven’t brought up the subject for years. “I think they think I can’t have any,” she says.

It isn’t that Sakiko doesn’t like children; it’s just that she wonders why she needs them. And she’s worried that the emotional dynamics of her marriage would change forever.

“When Japanese have children, they tend to focus on the child and not on their husbands, and I don’t like this,” Sakiko explains. “For example, if Westerners go on vacation, they will hire a baby-sitter and go out to dinner, but Japanese do not do this. The husband-wife bond turns into a mama-and-papa relationship, but I want to preserve my own relationship and time with him.”

It is an increasingly common complaint of young Japanese women in a land where hiring a baby-sitter--even if you can afford the standard $15-an-hour fee--is sometimes derided as “almost like checking your baby like luggage in a coin locker.”

In the postwar period, Japanese women by the millions fled hard factory work for the comforts of life as homemakers and devoted themselves to their children. Children were the purpose of marriage, indeed, the purpose of life. At weddings, it is still customary to exhort the young couple to “have children quickly, and be happy.”

Once a baby arrives, Japanese couples are expected to sleep with the child between them. Cribs are now more common but are still usually kept next to the bed. Many young couples could not afford a separate room for the baby even if they wanted one.

Much as she loves her husband, Sakiko does not think that he would get up at night with a baby.

The child’s well-being, behavior and educational attainment are all considered the mother’s responsibility. If a woman isn’t sure that she can produce model offspring single-handedly, or if she values herself as much as she cares for her children, it may be easier for her not to have kids.

“I think most people are living for their children,” Sakiko says. “I think most people would think I am selfish.”

Sometimes, she worries that in her old age, especially if her husband dies first, she might regret not having had a child. Then she wonders what she would gain in exchange for surrendering her freedom.

“My life now is so happy, and so good, that I’m content. I don’t need more,” she says. “I don’t need to go through all the difficulty and suffering of having a child to be satisfied. Everyone says if you have a child, you will be very happy, but I feel very happy now.”