REPORT: JAPANESE COULD BE FIRST EXTINT SOCIETY IF BIRTHRATE CONTINUES DOWNTREND

Japan's twin crises: Low birthrate and marriage aversion

April 13, 2023
by Michael Hoffman

CORA photo

TOKYO -- Childhood is in crisis. History is not repeating itself. This has never happened before. In Japan and worldwide – but in Japan especially – the strongest terminology applies.

Children in Japan are an endangered species. Fewer and fewer children are being born. The 799,278 births recorded in 2022 represent a 5.1-percent decline from 2021. It’s the seventh consecutive record low – down from a 1973 peak of 2.09 million. Elderly Japanese 65 or over constituted as of 2020 28.6 percent of the population – the highest in the world; children 15 or under: 11.8 percent – the world’s lowest. In purely numerical terms, children are being swamped. There are 13 million fewer children in Japan today than in 1950. That’s the state of affairs the government’s new Families and Children Agency, born April 1, confronts. Its head, gender affairs minister Masanobu Ogura, has vowed to create “a child-centered society.”

Spa (April 11-18) broadens the context. China and South Korea are in similar straits. China last year saw its population decline for the first time in 61 years. South Korea leads the 37 advanced nations of the OECD in an unenviable category: its death rate surpasses its birth rate by the widest margin.

Common to all three countries is a phenomenon that will weigh heavily on Ogura as he proceeds: marriage aversion. “Lifetime singles” – people aged 50 and up who have never married – comprise 23 percent of Japan’s population today, versus 5 percent in 1970. Various causes have been identified – economic, social and psychological. It costs vast sums nowadays to raise a child – let alone two or three. Children must be educated – as never before; high technology and related employment tend to leave the inexpensively-educated far behind. Great sacrifices are required. A minimum prerequisite is a stable job – increasingly elusive as part-time hiring spread. Wanted, children are an unaffordable luxury; unwanted, an avoidable burden. Why have children at all? Why marry?

There’s so much else to do. Liberated, economically independent women can live without husbands; a growing number prefer to. They can live without kids too. Why tie oneself down to drab motherhood and homemaking when careers and after-hours entertainment offer such exciting alternatives? China in 2016, its population aging, relaxed its one-child policy, introduced in 1980 to counter overpopulation – only to find that young Chinese were focused elsewhere. Making babies was a low priority. The regime’s invitation went unanswered. Some things even a dictatorship cannot command. Demographic aging speeds on.

How do children feel about all this? Their voices are seldom heard; when heard, imperfectly understood – naturally. Their psychology is different, their vocabulary limited. An adult word that seems to fit is “helpless;” or if that’s too strong, “vulnerable.” UNICEF, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, in 2020 ranked Japan 37th among 38 countries in terms of “children’s happiness. Japan’s government-affiliated child consultation centers report more child abuse than ever, more child suicides than ever, more and worse bullying than ever. It’s a jungle out there.

Things were bad, and then came COVID-19. UNICEF says children worldwide lost 2 trillion hours’ worth of education as schools closed against the pandemic. That’s serious in developed countries, catastrophic in poorer ones, where education has at best a precarious foothold. Japan is relatively fortunate; still, a 2021 joint survey of Japanese children’s lifestyles by the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Tokyo and Benesse Educational Research and Development Institute, found 40 percent of elementary school children and 60 percent of junior and senior high students answering “no” to the question “Do you feel motivated to study?” – a 10-percent rise from the last year before COVID, 2019.

Barring brutality, children probably take the world they see around them for granted; they know no other. A dwindling minority today, they’d probably be surprised to be shown the streets, parks and playgrounds of earlier times, swarming with laughing, shouting, crying little people. How it would buoy up their spirits! Then a child lived in a child’s world – a happiness few know today. Everyone agrees on the need – economic, social, psychological – for more children. What’s the recipe? “Ninety percent full-time employment,” journalist Miho Kobayashi tells Spa.

Japan’s part-time work force is swollen. The economic bubble of the 1970s and ’80s burst in the ’90s and corporations went frugal. Successive governments cooperated, annulling – in the name of “freedom to work as one pleased” – restrictions on part-time hiring. Employers found they could squeeze full-time work out of part-time staff paid part-time wages. Corollary to “freedom to work” was freedom to fire – redundant part-timers are simply told their services are no longer required, and that’s the end of them. There are no benefits and no job security. In 1990 Japan’s part-time work force was 20 percent of the total; now it’s 36.7 percent.

Childbirth declined in proportion to the rise of part-time work. Kobayashi hopes it will revive in proportion to the restoration of a full-time work. If it’s not too late.

Michael Hoffman is the author of “Arimasen.”