Posted on 02/15/2004 4:26:12 PM PST by DeaconBenjamin
GRIM economic predictions have been commonplace in post-bubble Japan but the most potentially devastating of all is only now starting to alarm policy makers and business leaders.
The dramatic slump in the nation's birth rate is the economic earthquake that no one knows how to avert. Stirring from policy paralysis, the Tokyo government's struggle to get the Japanese breeding again is looking increasingly desperate.
Recently, in the wake of the launch of the so-called 'Plus One' programme, an initiative by the Health, Labour and Welfare Ministry to coax another child out of every couple, a senior official admitted: 'If the low birth rate continues as it is, the nation's population could be reduced to less than a quarter of the current level, or as few as 30 million 100 years from now. If so, the nation's economy as well as its social welfare system would collapse, jeopardising the very foundation of the country.'
However apocalyptic the long-term view, concerns about the next two decades press most heavily on anxious Japanese, compounding their devastating reluctance to spend. The Home Affairs Ministry calculates that Japan's labour force will contract by 10 per cent to about 60 million by 2025, bringing the country's GDP down by a massive 6 per cent.
'The government is not doing enough and the public don't realise how serious this is,' says Mr Kazuyuki Kinbara, spokesman for the influential Japan Federation of Economic Organisations, or Keidanren. 'Right now, they are more worried about 5.1 per cent unemployment, but they are beginning to note the implications of this for the future state of their pension funds.'
Japan's baby shortage is more acute than the rest of the world's but it is not of course unique. Singapore has led the world in fashioning pro-family awareness campaigns, while Italy leads a virtually Europe-wide population slump.
FEW INCENTIVES TO BREED BUT Japan's ingrained and male-dominated social norms, and its consistently weak economic performance, make it the least promising location for the baby-friendly policies that could reverse the trend. To do so would require the active cooperation of the business sector at grassroots, and in recessionary times, they are more resistant than ever to workplace innovation.
Because of cultural antipathy to working mothers, the limited availability of satisfactory day care, and a general equation of motherhood with unrelieved drudgery, there are few existing incentives for Japanese women to breed. The child per woman average has dipped from 3.65 in 1950 to 1.34 in 2001, far below replacement levels.
Since the late 1980s, socially-engineered attitudes about the precedence of work over family, the ones that gave Japan its much vaunted economic edge until 1990, have remained rock-solid, despite decreasing rewards. While there is a growing sense that the old attitudes are outdated, there is no consensus on what should replace them.
'The government should make further efforts to provide an environment where working women can more easily have children without giving up a job,' says Mr Kinbara.
'The things the government needs to do are to improve the legal framework and encourage more cooperation on the part of husbands. Changing people's attitudes is necessary but hard because, more so than in Singapore, Japanese women's fertility is considered a private matter.'
The present reality in many if not most Japanese firms is that married women are kept in marginal posts, and working mothers barely tolerated.
DOWDY MOTHERHOOD V GUCCI MEANWHILE, the growth of service industries that attract women to the workplace and the narrowing wage gap between the sexes have made marriage and motherhood seem the dowdy option to millions of Vuitton and Gucci-fixated young women. And with the modern preference for love matches over family-arranged contracts, women are either postponing marriage until their late 20s - giving them fewer child-bearing years - or forgoing it altogether.
Tokyo's Plus One policy, budgeted at 1.7 trillion yen ($27 billion) a year has succeeded in increasing the amount of nursery places available, though these have filled up quickly. A raft of legislation last year included the establishment of the Centre to Promote Measures to Support the Development of the Next Generation, plus changes in the child welfare law.
But it will take more than policy objectives to change the way Japan Inc views personnel matters.
Innovations like paternity leave, which halted declining birth rates in Sweden and elsewhere, prompt gruff laughter from most Japanese men. Few would risk the mockery of their peers, or the wrath of the boss, by daring to apply.
Nor does the Japanese state meaningfully compensate parents for raising the next generation of taxpayers. According to Naoki Atsumi of the Fuji Research Institute, women who take an eight-year break from the workplace to nurture a child lose an average of 60 million yen, including salary and retirement allowances.
Ultimately, the Japanese fear economic uncertainty and the inconvenience and expense of reproducing even more than they love children.
Until Tokyo aggressively targets the hearts and minds of corporate Japan in the quest to make motherhood a more positive prospect for employees, Japan will either have to look abroad for workers to operate its giant economy, or accept a diminished version of its former world-beating economic glory.
How ironic.
So they need a hatch batch.
No, just outsource their young women. We'll, uh, well you know, send them back with a little baby san in the oven.
So the feminists have poisoned the Japanese women as well.
That said, this article doesn't mention (surprise, surprise) heavy taxation as a possible reason why they're not having babies....does anyone know the tax situation in Japan?
Japan's economic decline accelerated with the takeover of the U.S. government by Clinton's minions. Up until that time, many Japanese women preferred to be housewifes or kyoiku mama who would work part-time and generally trade lower income for themselves for higher income for the household. This ended when Japan was encouraged to copy U.S. style gender-equality laws wiping out such protections for female workers as extended overtime (past 8 p.m.). By increasing the influx of women into once male-dominated jobs, companies begin abandoning lieftime employment guarantees and replacing older male workers with lower paid women, for whom lower pay could be justified based on experience.
This trend further accelerated when Soros engineered the collapse of the Thai Baht, Malaysian Ringgit and Indonesian Rupiah in 1998, leading Japanese multinationals to follow the U.S. (Clinton administrion) lead in outsourcing more jobs from South Asia to China. There was acually talk at that time of using the Japanese yen as the base for an Asian currency to rival the dollar or Euro. However, once Bush was elected in 2000, the United States once again decided to make Japan, not China, the center of its policy in America and such talk has been largely abandoned.
The Japanese still have a belief that there are only 3-4 universities that are "acceptable" to go to. Companies draw heavily from those universities, and jobs are scarce now in Japan, compared to earlier.
One Japanese company began offering US equivalent of $10,000 to each female worker to have a child. Reportedly one woman sniffed, "That won't even pay for a year of juku."
Juku is the private, after-school tutoring that most Japanese upper-elementary and middle school students *must* take, if they are to get into the "right" high school and thus into the "right" university. The kids work 10 or more hours per week *above* their time in school learning how to pass the strict high school entrance exams. Apparently it's fairly expensive.
Apparently studying overseas isn't considered as "acceptable" as going to a prestigious Japanese university. As long as the country is so obsessed with status, people simply won't have children, or will only have one or two at the most (who can afford all that juku?)
Most excellent point. Ironically, we're supposed to be all jealous and emulative of the "Japanese educational miracle," when in actuality rampant feminism will *destroy* the Japanese educational advantage.
First is the practice of mother being *totally* devoted to her child while the child is an infant and toddler. Our children were in a Saturday-morning Japanese language school and it was a pleasure to watch the Japanese mothers with their toddlers. Their attentiveness was incredible. They always looked at the kids, knew where they were every second, disciplined them without raising a hand or voice, and yet the kids were incredibly well-behaved. They talked to their children constantly.
My own Japanese instructor told us that it's *routine* for Japanese mothers to teach their very young children (3-4 years old) to read the katakana/hiragana scripts, because they're entirely phonetic and have no weird spelling rules. By the time the child goes to school at age 6 he's highly fluent - but then of course has to start learning the kanji.
Then you mention the "school-going mamas." I had heard they would literally sit next to a child all day and help them in the classroom if the child was struggling. They also enroll the children in juku (after-school tutoring) and nag them endlessly about school work.
Sending women off to low-paying jobs is *not* "cost-effective" when you consider all the time and effort Japanese women *have* been investing in their children.
And there is the elephant that no one wants to talk about.
Most retirement systems are based on the ratio of people to retirees in the work force. A lot of this would go away with a privatized retirement plan which would mean that having young people continually entering the system and paying for the retirees would not be necessary.
Is that a bad thing, however? I think a lot of US schools could benefit if the students had to help clean them. For one thing, people are a lot less eager to trash a place if they know the next afternoon they'll just have to clean it again.
Our own district has no school busses. At least in Japan, I understand, the kids can take mass transit to school.
I for one would like to hear more about how Japanese schools are run.
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