A different pattern from either Barbados or Bangladesh appears to apply, at least at the aggregate level, in both Japan and Singapore, where very few women under the age of 20 years either enter into marriage or have children. In many cases in East and Southeast Asia recent decades have seen progressive and rather substantial rises in age at marriage, with figures for first marriage of females in Peninsular Malaysia, for example, increasing from 19.4 years in 1957 to 22.3 years in 1970 and to 23.8 years in 1980 (Arshat and Mohd 1989:101). In Singapore the increase was even steeper, from 20.3 years in 1957 to 26.2 years in 1980 and 27 years in 1990 (United Nations 1994:333).
Households headed by single women are relatively uncommon in both Japan and Singapore. Japan, indeed, has been characterized as having a direction of change in family patterns at odds with that of other industrialized nations, with a declining rate of divorce and a decrease in the proportion of out-of-wedlock births, coinciding with a rise of the nuclear family (Burns and Scott 1994:32, 110). The proportion of all households headed by females, moreover, declined between 1980 and 1990 (United Nations 1989:1160-1, 1993:97-8). Because marriages are less prone to dissolution through divorce in both Japan and Singapore than in many European countries, there is a much larger proportion of female heads who are widows than those who are divorced or separated (United Nations 1989:1160-2).