Robin’s Story
Marco Rice (Tokyo)
It’s a Wednesday night and I’m sitting across from my friend, Robin, in her apartment in East Tokyo. Behind her, playing with her portion of rice and salmon, is the cutest one-year-old I have ever seen. Robin is 28 years old, a fifth-year JET and a single mother by choice.
As she defines it, a single mother by choice is “someone who chooses the path of parenthood either through donor sperm or eggs, surrogacy, or adoption. . . going into parenthood, from before conception without a partner involved.”
While there is growing international awareness of moms like Robin, they are still under-resourced and overstigmatized—especially in Japan, as Robin knows firsthand. By sharing her story, she hopes to raise more awareness of non-traditional paths to parenthood and provide a resource for prospective single mothers in Japan.
Making the choice to become a single mother
Robin knew since high school that she wanted to become a parent. She also knew she wanted to do so at a young age, partly because her parents were nearly 40 when they had her.
“I think a lot of people with older parents will understand this but,when you get to a certain age, you start to realize your time with them is limited. I also realized that my child’s time with them is limited, and if I didn’t have a child sooner rather than later, they probably wouldn’t remember my parents. And as an only child, that made me really sad,” Robin explains.
In college, she had decided that if she didn’t have a partner by the age of 25, she would pursue having a child on her own.
When Robin was first accepted into the JET program, she hadn’t expected to have a child. She had planned to spend only one or two years in Japan, then have a child back home in the US, most likely with her long-term girlfriend. But at the end of her first year on JET, Robin broke up with her girlfriend and started to think more seriously about having a child on her own.
After running the numbers, she realized how much cheaper it is to have a baby in Japan compared to America. Besides, she was happy living in Japan and didn’t want to sacrifice her life here in order to have a child.
Some of Robin’s family and friends worried for her. The image of the struggling single mother is very culturally pervasive, Robin explains, but there is a big difference when it is a choice. “It’s hard, no matter what. . . but going into single parenthood with the knowledge that you’re going to do things alone. . . is easier than becoming a single parent by chance.”
For the next two years, Robin focused on building her savings and was able to set aside about 50,000 yen per month from the JET salary, even while living in Tokyo. She is grateful for this, because once she started the process, she was no longer able to save any money.
Choosing a donor
When she was ready, Robin began looking for a sperm donor. After looking at a few different organizations, Robin ended up finding her match on Pride Angel, a website that aims to connect single people as well as lesbian, gay, or infertile couples with sperm donors, egg donors, or coparents. The donor she chose is a Japanese citizen who is half-American and half-Japanese, and lives close enough that the two could meet up for fertility treatments.
She considered working with a company that imports donor sperm from abroad, but ultimately ruled it out. The costs were high and she didn’t want to use anonymous sperm. “Children have a right to know who their biological family is,” she explains, even though this comes with its own challenges and risks.
Abroad, families with donor-conceived children often involve lawyers to secure custody arrangements. In Japan, custody laws are different, exclusively favoring the parent who currently has physical custody of the child, which works in Robin’s favor. There is also almost no documentation that connects Bia, Robin’s daughter, to her biological father. He isn’t on any of Bia’s legal documents and Bia does not appear on his koseki, the Japanese official family registry (which also means that Bia does not have a claim to Japanese citizenship, a question Robin gets frequently).
The only document his name appears on is a form that he and Robin had to sign at the fertility clinic stating that they were ‘long-term partners.’ She chose Pride Angel also because it was the only clinic she found that did not require a marriage certificate. The intrauterine insemination (IUI) was successfully run through both Robin and her donor’s insurance without any need for further documentation and, luckily, it only took one insemination to get a positive pregnancy test.
Post-conception came with more costs, since prenatal care, labor, and delivery are not fully covered by Japanese health insurance. There are coupon systems that cover the majority of prenatal care, but access to the coupons is not available until the pregnancy is registered with the local city hall at 12 weeks. After registering, Robin received her Boshi-Techo, a handbook used to track all maternal and child health from pregnancy through the age of six.
Bia was born, healthy and beautiful, in August of 2024.
Childcare challenges
Robin took 12 months of maternity leave, though she acknowledges that without her parents’ financial support, a full year would not have been possible. She received four months of fully-paid maternity leave—two months before birth and two months after. The 10 months that followed are also legally required to be offered as childcare leave. For Robin’s insurance as a Tokyo private school JET, this worked out to two-thirds pay for the first half and 50% for the second half. She spent seven months of her maternity leave in Indiana with her family, then returned to Tokyo in May to begin the process of securing childcare.
The Japanese school year begins in April and it is extremely difficult to get into a nursery school in Tokyo outside of that window, even for Japanese citizens. Space is limited and fills up quickly. Robin’s maternity leave ended in July and she was ready to return to work in August, which presented a challenge: there was no availability in any local nursery schools. While maternity leave can be extended up to 24 months at 50% pay if childcare is unavailable—a possibility for parents with a partner working full-time—this is simply not feasible for a single parent. Additionally, Robin herself wanted to return to work.
At the city hall, Robin was told that she wouldn’t be able to get a spot. “It’s funny because Japanese people usually don’t want to guarantee anything, but they were like, ‘It’s not happening,’” Robin recounts.
They told her she had to apply anyway and that once she received an official rejection, she could apply for a subsidy which would allow a babysitter to come to her house daily for only ¥150 per hour, reduced from ¥3,000. The only hurdle was that nanny companies required clients to make arrangements over the phone, which was difficult given Robin’s level of Japanese.
She emailed the handful of companies that did not require phone calls, but none had availability for the hours she needed. One company assured her for a month they could find someone, only to later change their mind. Time was running out before Robin had to return to work, so a friend from home came to stay with Robin from August to early November to watch Bia during the day—until, finally, a company was able to secure one nanny to work Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays, and a different nanny to come on Tuesdays, starting in November.
If she could offer advice to a prospective parent in Tokyo, Robin recommends enrolling a child in daycare starting in April, even if it shortens family leave. Even then, spots are not guaranteed, as they are allocated based on a point system. Thankfully, the system gives priority to single parents and full-time employees, so Robin is optimistic that Bia will be enrolled in nursery school starting this April.
Looking toward the future
Bia has seven known half-siblings, most of whom live in Japan with a few others spread across the world. It is important to Robin for Bia to have a relationship with her biological father and half-siblings, for as long as she wants it. Her view is also shaped by her own experience as a child conceived through sperm donation. She was able to connect later in her life with two half-siblings from her father’s donations and values those connections deeply. Ideally, Robin envisions an annual gathering with Bia’s biological family.
At this point in our conversation, Bia crawls onto the table and tries to grab the yatsuhashi laid out on the table—a choking hazard that Robin swiftly takes away. She pulls her daughter into her lap instead and wraps her arms around her. Bia beams.
I ask Robin what she is looking forward to in the next 5 years.
“It’s so cliché but I’m excited to see her grow, see what kind of person she’s going to grow up to be.” Robin pauses while Bia babbles happily. “I guess I’m looking forward to seeing what my path holds, what I’m going to do. I think I’m going to teach when I go back to the States. I feel like our time on JET exists in this liminal space of putting a pause on having to be a real adult. You know, we’re working, we’re paying taxes here, and it is a real job, but it also doesn’t feel like it is a real job. And going back to the States feels like it’s really the start of my life as an adult. . . and now I have a child. So it’ll really be quite different and I’m excited to see what happens in my life.”
Before I leave, she shows me her newest tattoo, a colorful frog on her arm. “It’s because when Bia was born we called her ‘froggy girl’ because her legs were always up like this,” she demonstrates, folding her arms up into frog legs and smiling, “so this is my frog for Bia.”
Bia and the tattoo frog have an identical glow in their eyes—well-loved and wanted.
Author Bio:
Born and raised in Seattle, Marco Rice is a first year JET in Tokyo. On the weekends you’re more likely to find him outside of the city, smiling at trees.