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.
Even if I'm an employee, I regard myself as working for myself.
No one on their death-bed wished they'd spent more time at the office
Jobs are a commodity, as the out-sourcing movement is now showing us.
React accordingly.
Each of the kids took their turns with classroom cleaning, serving meals, and caring for the classroom pet which varied from room-to-room-- a hamster, finch, goldfish aquarium, etc.
I would gladly trade the nicely tiled classrooms and full services lunches of their high school here for the courtesy and civilized behavior they left behind in Japan. None of my kids even knew what the f*** word meant until moving back to the United States. Here, they get so sick of hearing it that they talk about how much better it was in Japan-- where the worst drug abuse was alcohol and tobacco.
Can you shed some light on this...Please.
Thanks for the info., I pinged "ronin" (I hope I didn't piss him off :). Next time, I shall read the whole thread before I ask any questions. :/
I wonder why they have such high unemployment if they're running out of people. You'd think young workers would have their choice of jobs.
That's much better pay than I would have expected. I wonder how old the data is.
They know that and that's the direction they're headed. They significantly eased rules the year before I moved there (1999) and again a few years later.
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