Two prominent theses on social change concur with regard to the on-going development of family systems in the process of general social change: the model of the “second demographic transition”, suggested by the demographers van de Kaa and Lesthaeghe; and the model of “family change”, proposed by the crosscultural psychologist Kagitçibasi. This paper presents an empirical test based on an analysis of family change in Japan, a collectivistic, yet modernised society; and in Germany, a society characterised by ‘Western’ individualism. Our empirical test is based on 12 cumulated, representative surveys from these two societies, which together cover the family formation processes of 49,983 women born between 1915 and 1985. For both Germany and Japan, we examine the influence of educational inequality on family formation, and explore how it has changed over a period of 60 years, by means of multivariate Cox regression analyses. The two models emphasise different aspects of the change in the family formation process: although the changes point in the direction predicted by the second demographic transition model, the differences between the two societies have remained stable or have even widened, in line with the family change model.