Across eleven years of engagement with these salarywomen, I have observed many interesting developments in their lives as workers and as wives and mothers.  All of the women I interviewed seem determined to stay employed at the firm, if they have not already left. .Some women and their husbands have placed their children into private junior or senior high schools, and some children are also now enrolled in university, or graduated and trying to find their way in the difficult job market.  Some of my respondents are actively trying to have their children become internationally savvy. They are having them learn English, or enrolling them in summer homestay programs. My oldest respondent has also had one of her children marry recently, to a man with a foreign ethnic background--another harbinger of a more multiethnic, cosmopolitan Japan. Children's illnesses have also been encountered. One woman has had to ask the firm for flexibility in regard to her schedule as one of her children now has a serious chronic illness.

Another major foci of this round of interviews was intimacy with marital partners.  I have found that most of the women in my data set, who are in the prime years of their lives,  no longer have nor desire intimate relations with their spouses. I need to read further in the literature to make sense of this finding.   

I also looked into attitudes toward promotion. Most women do not desire promotion until their children are grown, as they wish to concentrate on rearing them rather than to put in late hours and weekends at the firm.  This suggests that Prime Minister's 'womenomics' strategy may have difficulties being implemented if firms do not change their practices of overtime and long hours.