This book describes the development of studies of the family system in Japan and the West, introducing the evolution of the key concept of kin availability. It points out that the concept was first formulated by the Japanese sociologist Teizo Toda in the 1930s to analyze the unexpectedly low frequency of three-generation family households in Japan in the 1920s. The book provides an analytic model proposed by the author in the 1980s, which explains the halt in the decrease in the prevalence of married children residing with their parents in the 1970s and 1980s in Japan. The author maintains that this change was caused not by the breakdown of the nuclearization of the family system, but by a decrease in the availability of parents with whom to co-reside. This model provides a sophisticated measurement of living- arrangement behavior, showing that fewer people in Japan are choosing to co-reside. It can also be applied to regions where there is demographic transition and the stem-family system is maintained to varying degrees. The book shows that a controversy similar to that surrounding the Japanese family was occurring in the West in the 1980s in the context of the then recently discovered scarcity of extended families in seventeenth and eighteenth- century England. It shows that the quantitative historian Steven Ruggles came close to successfully resolving this question using a model based on the concept of kin availability.

The book demonstrates that these endeavors in the 1980s yielded a new discipline of family demography both in Japan and the West and that one of the key concepts articulated by the author has taken on practical as well as theoretical significance with regard to the provision of care for the elderly in residing with the generation of children born after the1970s.