Childbirths in Japan are on course in 2022 to fall below 800,000 babies for the first time in recorded history since 1899. - AFP
TOKYO, Dec 11 (The Straits Times/ANN): Planet Earth hit a milestone of eight billion people in November, but the prognosis for Japan, the world’s oldest society, is bleak.
Entrepreneur Elon Musk warned in a tweet in May that the country could “eventually cease to exist”.
On Tuesday, a headline in the respectable Gendai Business magazine screamed: “Will the Japanese race go extinct? A shocking future where banks and malls will disappear from rural areas by 2030”.
Childbirths in Japan are on course in 2022 to fall below 800,000 for the first time in recorded history since 1899, government forecasts released in November show. There were 811,000 babies born in 2021.
Government data show that 599,636 Japanese were born in the first nine months of 2022, which was 4.9 per cent less than the same period last year.
This suggests an accelerating pace of decline – it has only been six years since annual births fell below one million for the first time, in 2016. Now, Japan is a good eight years ahead of forecasts: childbirths were expected to fall below the 800,000 threshold only in 2030.
What this means is that the population of 124.9 million as at November – a figure that has been shrinking since it hit a peak of 128.1 million in 2009 – may fall below 100 million far sooner than the predicted 2053, and reach 60 million earlier than the forecast 2100.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno described the slowing births as a “critical situation”, promising “comprehensive measures” to encourage more marriages and babies. Marriages are important as few babies are born out of wedlock in Japan.
This dire situation is not for want of trying, although experts have noted that efforts so far are “patchwork attempts” that do not solve the fundamental problem.
Among the initiatives that are in place are generous paid paternity and maternity leave benefits of up to one year; new childcare facilities that have reduced lengthy waiting lists to record lows (though these facilities have varying standards, and there have been several fatal cases of neglect); subsidies to cover the cost of childbirth; insurance coverage for pricey fertility treatment; and more recently, handouts of up to 100,000 yen (S$993) per child to ease inflationary pressures on families.
Yet experts point to two structural issues behind the persistent struggle to raise birth rates.
First, stagnant wages are a major deterrence to couples who intend to have children – an issue that has grown especially acute with inflation now at decades-long highs.
One in seven children is born into poverty, and the pressures of raising children appear to have manifested themselves in growing numbers of child abuse cases that are sometimes fatal.
Health Ministry data showed a record 207,000 child abuse cases in the year ending March 2022, while there are at least 50 child abuse deaths a year.
Second, structural employment issues in the workplace that are unfavourable to “irregular” contract workers – who comprise an estimated four in 10 in the workforce – and women mean that mothers continue to face pressures when they give birth.
Public broadcaster NHK noted in a report on Dec 1 that pledges to “strengthen measures” are starting to sound like a broken record. “This has been said for more than 30 years,” the report stated.
It cited Cabinet adviser Shiro Yamazaki, a former bureaucrat whose expertise is in social security, as saying: “A politician once told me that child-rearing policies won’t win us elections.”
It is easy to see the scepticism in the world’s greyest society, where a record 29.1 per cent of the population are senior citizens aged 65 and older. The elderly are also more likely to vote than youth, who are generally politically apathetic.
It has not always been this way. Japan underwent two “baby booms” – one in 1949 when there were a record 2.7 million births, and then another in 1973 when there were 2.1 million births.
But births have declined since then, resulting in an overburdened social security system, where contributions like health insurance and pension premiums are estimated to be 44.3 per cent of income.
And this will potentially get worse, as Prime Minister Fumio Kishida looks for ways to cover the outlay for policies to address two major “existential crises” faced by the nation – in defence, with geopolitical tensions simmering, and in demographics, with the shrinking births.
As it is, the cracks are showing: the Self-Defence Forces are struggling to recruit enough people every year.
On Monday, Mr Kishida vowed to raise defence spending by more than 50 per cent over five years to 43 trillion yen. He has also pledged to devote two trillion yen over three years to support families with children.
Among the ideas being mooted to cover the increased spending is an increase of consumption tax to 15 per cent from the current 10 per cent. There is even a suggestion of having the well-off elderly pay more to cover a doubling of the “children’s budget”.
In 2023, Japan will launch a Children and Families Agency under the Cabinet Office to streamline child-related policies.
Yet whether Mr Kishida can go far enough to reverse the trend with the new agency remains to be seen, given that its functions remain ambiguous and policies vague.
Some couples – like famous actress Tomoko Yamaguchi and her husband, actor Toshiaki Karasawa, or start-up adviser Madoka Sawa and his wife Naoko – have shunned children out of preference, publicly saying that they have never wanted to have offspring.
“I don’t agree with the idea that ‘only having children is right, not having them is evil’,” Mr Sawa wrote in a blog post in May. “Is contributing to the country simply a matter of having children? As someone who was never happy as a child, I can’t let that experience pass on from me.”
Studies have shown that financial pressures, like those weighing on a Tokyo-based 29-year-old video production assistant who gave her name as Satsuki in an online post in May, are more common.
One study, by The University of Tokyo Graduate School of Public Policy in April, found that couples with higher incomes and higher education tend to have more children.
“I don’t think I want children,” Satsuki said. “It’s expensive, and I want to cherish the time between the two of us together.”
Satsuki has been married for two years. Her husband is an “irregular” contract employee, while she is a part-time worker. Contract employees are on low salaries and do not qualify for benefits like childcare leave.
Noting estimates that raising a child until graduation from college would require up to 30 million yen, Satsuki said: “We both have income now and so we can manage without problems. But who knows when we will lose our jobs? And if we have children, how are we going to take care of them?”
And an Osaka-based blogger who goes by the moniker Keikobu, who has been married for eight years, said: “It takes about 20 years to raise a child, and there is a major financial burden. Being Dinks (dual income, no kids) means economic comfort that leads to peace of mind.” - The Straits Times/ANN
