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Japan's birth dearth
FOR THE STRAITS TIMES ^ | By COLIN DONALD

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.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Foreign Affairs; Government; Japan
KEYWORDS: birthrate; catholiclist; japan
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Paul Marx, of Human Life International, once observed that people will not have children for the state.
1 posted on 02/15/2004 4:26:12 PM PST by DeaconBenjamin
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To: DeaconBenjamin
Japan might have to outsource more jobs to the USA.

How ironic.

2 posted on 02/15/2004 4:30:59 PM PST by CROSSHIGHWAYMAN (I don't believe anything a Democrat says. Bill Clinton set the standard!)
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To: DeaconBenjamin
Maybe China and Japan, with their respective 'birth control' policies should get together and work something out.
3 posted on 02/15/2004 4:32:05 PM PST by opinionator
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To: DeaconBenjamin
They're going to have to do what every other advanced country does and import workers.
4 posted on 02/15/2004 4:32:53 PM PST by Batrachian
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To: DeaconBenjamin
I read an economist with AEI state that the unemployment rate in Tokyo is about 25% for under 30s. Might have something to do with the problem.
5 posted on 02/15/2004 4:41:38 PM PST by DeaconBenjamin
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To: DeaconBenjamin
Japan's birth dearth

So they need a hatch batch.

6 posted on 02/15/2004 4:48:53 PM PST by In_25_words_or_less
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To: DeaconBenjamin
Your government needs workers to generate taxes for the state, so get busy breeding or else!
7 posted on 02/15/2004 4:57:51 PM PST by Voltage
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To: DeaconBenjamin
After years of attack on motherhood, fatherhood, and the family by the Liberals, guess what we get.

If they would just quite messing with society and trying to social engineer it, to THEIR concepts, everything would be a lot better.
8 posted on 02/15/2004 5:04:44 PM PST by sd-joe
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To: In_25_words_or_less
So they need a hatch batch. LOL
9 posted on 02/15/2004 5:04:55 PM PST by risk
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To: CROSSHIGHWAYMAN
"Japan might have to outsource more jobs to the USA."

No, just outsource their young women. We'll, uh, well you know, send them back with a little baby san in the oven.

10 posted on 02/15/2004 5:09:45 PM PST by Enterprise ("Do you know who I am?")
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To: DeaconBenjamin
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.

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?

11 posted on 02/15/2004 5:20:44 PM PST by Lizavetta (Savage is right - extreme liberalism is a mental disorder.)
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To: DeaconBenjamin
This kind of demographic catastrophe was predictable 20 years ago and more. And the social planners are only just noticing it? A bit late. You can't start turning out teenagers and young adults right away--it takes years.
12 posted on 02/15/2004 5:29:21 PM PST by Cicero (Marcus Tullius)
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To: Lizavetta
Actually, Japanese taxes are considerably lighter than American taxes on the middle class. I worked there for 13 years and made the equivalent of $80K. In addition to child exemptions of $3800, there were generous tax credits of $50 per month per preschool child from various local governments (available to legal foreign workers as well as the locals). My total tax bite was never more than 10%.

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.

13 posted on 02/15/2004 5:38:33 PM PST by Vigilanteman
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bump
14 posted on 02/15/2004 5:43:36 PM PST by sushiman
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To: DeaconBenjamin
Pat Buchanan pointed this out in his book, The Death of the West--Europe and America are facing the same problem as well--we're not replacing ourselves, so Third Worlders are filling the vacuum.
15 posted on 02/15/2004 5:59:11 PM PST by green nexus
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To: DeaconBenjamin
The article fails to mention a very important factor keeping Japan's birth rate down.

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?)

16 posted on 02/15/2004 6:01:16 PM PST by valkyrieanne
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To: Vigilanteman
"Actually, Japanese taxes are considerably lighter than American taxes on the middle class. I worked there for 13 years and made the equivalent of $80K. In addition to child exemptions of $3800, there were generous tax credits of $50 per month per preschool child from various local governments (available to legal foreign workers as well as the locals). My total tax bite was never more than 10%."

Don't forget the 5% national sales tax which is imposed on ALL goods and SERVICES including rents , hospital bills , medicine , food ...Ever ride on the expressways ? Talk about outrageous ! Costs over $200 one way to drive from Fukuoka to Tokyo , only 650 miles !!! Loads of " hidden " taxes as well . And in Japan you don't get the services one would get from the government ( national and local ) in the USA . Sure could use a few snow plows around here in winter and some salt on the roads !

The Japanese spend much less per capita on education / schools than the USA . I teach JHS/HS in Kumamoto . We just got hooked up to the internet last year ! No heat in the hallways . No shower rooms for sports teams . Kids have to clean/maintain the school - no custodians . Kids have to serve their own lunches ( food is delivered - no kitchen staff ) . No school buses . I could go on . The government is very stingy with the dough they rake in from the sheeple .
17 posted on 02/15/2004 6:06:18 PM PST by sushiman
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To: Vigilanteman
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.

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.

18 posted on 02/15/2004 6:08:23 PM PST by valkyrieanne
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To: DeaconBenjamin
If so, the nation's economy as well as its social welfare system would collapse

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.

19 posted on 02/15/2004 6:10:11 PM PST by Harmless Teddy Bear (Don't try to tug at my heart strings. I have no heart and it will make me suspicious of your motives)
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To: sushiman
The Japanese spend much less per capita on education / schools than the USA . I teach JHS/HS in Kumamoto . We just got hooked up to the internet last year ! No heat in the hallways . No shower rooms for sports teams . Kids have to clean/maintain the school - no custodians . Kids have to serve their own lunches ( food is delivered - no kitchen staff ) . No school buses . I could go on . The government is very stingy with the dough they rake in from the sheeple .

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.

20 posted on 02/15/2004 6:10:36 PM PST by valkyrieanne
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