Singles under pressure – “solo weddings” as the secret to happiness in Japan

With the launch of the annual programme in October 2025, this exploration will be taken further and developed along the programme’s thematic focuses. In January, the lecture series continues with the focus Family Secrets and comprises five sessions through April. It then shifts its attention to alternative ways of living and diverse family concepts in a subsequent thematic focus.

Focus Family Secrets

The focus Family Secrets turns its attention to hidden dimensions of family relationships, where intimacy, protection, and conflict intersect. At the centre are practices of concealment and disclosure that shape individual life stories as well as social orders.

Secrets are more than concealed information: they condense needs for protection and intimacy, as well as feelings of shame, fear of exposure, and the pressure of social norms. As part of biographical experience, family secrets deeply affect personal life narratives. Practices of telling and withholding make visible how relationships are formed, boundaries drawn, and social orders negotiated — revealing how secrets extend far beyond the private sphere to create belonging, mark boundaries, and stabilise or unsettle social structures.

The lecture series is being held as part of a collaboration between all institutions of the Humboldt Forum.

Head Curator for the Programme year 2025-26: Dr. Laura Goldenbaum

Lifelong singlehood is a social experience that affects more and more people in Japan.

In recent years, so-called solo weddings have attracted media and academic attention in Japan. These are staged wedding ceremonies in which single women without partners hold a wedding with professional clothing, photography, and ritual elements. The lecture examines solo weddings as a cultural phenomenon at the intersection of the individual search for happiness, consumer culture, and changing marriage and gender norms in Japanese society.

Solo weddings are just one phenomenon among a variety of solo activities in Japan’s consumer culture that have emerged in recent years. The lecture explores how these activities can be classified in a society that traditionally places a high priority on the group.

Based on quantitative data, media analyses, and case studies, it shows that solo weddings should be understood less as an expression of social isolation and more as an ambivalent practice of self-affirmation in a society in which traditional family norms are increasingly disappearing.

PARTICIPANTS

Prof. Dr. Anette Schad-Seifert, Professor of Modern Japanese Studies at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf

Annette Schad-Seifert has been a university professor at the Institute for Modern Japan at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf since 2006. She studied Japanese Studies and Religious Studies at the Free University of Berlin, as well as Philosophy and Political History of Ideas at Keio University in Tokyo. Her work focuses on family policy, single society, gender relations, demographic change, and new forms of social differentiation. She has worked as a research assistant at the Free University of Berlin, the University of Leipzig, and the German Institute for Japanese Studies in Tokyo. In 2018, she was a specially appointed professor at Ochanomizu University in Tokyo. She is the editor (with Uta Meier-Gräwe and Miyoko Motozawa) of the book Family Life in Japan and Germany (Springer Verlag 2019).

Prof. Dr. Daniel Tyradellis (Humboldt University of Berlin)

Dr. Alia Rayyan (Humboldt University of Berlin)

Dr. Laura Goldenbaum (Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss)

- Price: free admission
- Duration: 120 min
- Language: German
- Place: Humboldt Forum, Ground Floor, Hall 3
- Part of: Lecture Series Family Matters