Japan is aging due to a lack of children and a lack of immigration. The government seeks to improve birth rates while maintaining conventional family arrangements.
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| An aerial view of world’s most populated city Tokyo, Japan |
For decades, it has been able to witness how Japan’s long-term ruling party, the LDP, has governed a policy area critical to the country’s future only under increased pressure. Since 2011, Japan’s population has been declining. According to projections, the population might be back to 33 million in 100 years, where it was in the mid-nineteenth century. Japan now has a population of about 125 million people. The average age is rising; by 2020, 30 percent of the population would be above the age of 65.
For decades, it has been able to witness how Japan’s long-term ruling party, the LDP, has governed a policy area critical to the country’s future only under increased pressure. Since 2011, Japan’s population has been declining. According to projections, the population might be back to 33 million in 100 years, where it was in the mid-nineteenth century. Japan now has a population of about 125 million people. The average age is rising; by 2020, 30 percent of the population would be above the age of 65.
When the country was rocked by the so-called 1.57 shock in 1990, the subject of population development entered the political agenda. The figure represented the birth rate at the moment, which had fallen below the 1964 level for the first time. 1964 was the year of the fire horse, and it was advised that females not be born since they would bring ill luck to their future spouses. The substantial drop in the birth rate shows how many (possible) parents opted to play it safe and postponed the pregnancy. It increased to 2 again in 1965. In a year devoid of superstition, the birth rate in 1990 fell below that of the fire horse year. That jolted the government.
Since 1990, a variety of measures have been implemented to combat the low birth rate, beginning with the “Engelsplan” (1994), and including the “New Engelsplan” (1999), the “Support Plan for Children and Education” (2004), the “Emergency Measures to Combat Low Birthrate” (2013), and the “New Plan for Carefree Parenting” (2014). (2020). All of these programs, as well as a few others, fell short of expectations, in part due to inadequate funding. Furthermore, after the corresponding measures were unveiled, top politicians swiftly lost interest. Only the Clean Government Party, the coalition’s junior partner, occasionally advocated for financial help for families.
The birth rate was 1.3 in 2021, which was disappointing. When Fumio Kishida’s administration stated that it aimed to treble the defense budget and would have to raise taxes to do so, it was followed by another family policy drive to boost fertility. This time, the emphasis is on “childbirth promotion in a different [financial] dimension.”
To that purpose, the “Conference for Achieving a Good Future for Children and Young People” was formed. Women are underrepresented in this body, as they are in other political bodies. At the same time, one can see that Japanese governments, who are presented with a long-delayed but significant crisis, are familiar with the round table, also known as a people’s conference. It’s as if the urgency of a rising grievance is being handled by not only gathering all of the facts on this “problem” from the start, but also hearing all of the viewpoints and interests.
The government’s widespread lack of interest in a subject that has been vital to the Japanese country for decades is due, among other things, to a lack of organization and representation of the concerns of young families and future parents. While philanthropic organizations, churches, and trade unions lobby for these target groups in Germany, these players either have minimal power or do not present in Japan’s political arena. Opposition parties, some of which want to be more visible in family policy, but also famously lacking in influence. They have only been in power for four years since 1955, whereas the LDP has been in charge for the previous 64 (!) years.
Another reason for the LDP’s unwillingness to do more for families and young (possible) parents, and therefore to encourage the birth rate, is the conservative wing’s desire to maintain their vision of the “traditional family”: male single earner, female family manager with care obligations. The fight for this family model is, of course, futile: globalization, labor shortages, and, most importantly, women’s far greater educational credentials have buried the convoy system, which was prevalent until the 1980s.
In it, the government took care of the companies with business-friendly policies, the companies devoured their male employees skin and hair, but did not fire them even in bad times and thus secured families, so that many wives and mothers did not even have to enter the labor market and were able to provide for both the children and the older family generation. Business, government and families all sailed together like a convoy. As I said, once.
The expenditures of having children put further strain on the birth rate. Even a simple birth costs young parents in Japan a few hundred euros. Child benefit is between 70 and 100 euros per month for children under the age of 15. Very recently did the governor of Tokyo attempt to improve the metropolitan area’s birth rate (2021: 1.08) by giving an additional 35 euros per month for each kid under the age of 18. Parental allowance and other assistance programs are not available in Germany.
Japanese parents who seek a decent education and work chances for their children are also conscious of the high school and university tuition costs. It’s no surprise that a vast majority of young women indicate in studies that they only want to marry a man who can provide a stable, high-income for their children. Because without marriage, there will be no children. Just 2% of young parents in Japan are not married, and the knot is seldom tied for reasons other than the desire to have children.
Additional considerations are not unique to Japan: because women prefer to marry men with comparable or higher educational levels, the marriage market for both men and women diminishes with each female college graduate. Female education has a negative relationship with marriage and reproduction. This is due, in part, to a lack of opportunity to balance work and family life. To a doubt, labor shortages are compelling corporations to make these concessions, but they are too few and too late. The fact that voting turnout among individuals under the age of 29 is roughly 30% further adds to the pressure on decision-makers.
Around 70% of those aged 60 to 69 years old, a far greater group in terms of numbers, use their voting rights. We don’t use the term “silver democracy” for nothing. Social development has long evolved to the point where the one-child family has become the norm, and an increasing number of young people are asking themselves, “Why have children at all?” Why married in the first place? Why not get a pet?
Meanwhile, the situation in rural regions is getting increasingly tough, since the proportion of individuals in need of care is larger and that of young people is lower than in metropolitan cities. As a result, local lawmakers are under intense pressure to hire foreign nurses. Yet, the national government makes it difficult for them. Rather, it responds to economic pressure, which necessitates labor in other, industrial industries. For developed nations, immigration is extremely low, is rarely mentioned by the government, and is rarely accompanied by integration initiatives.
And those who are required to travel there for a limited time and are only permitted to bring families in a few circumstances have two choices in Taiwan and South Korea, which appear to be more appealing than Japan in many ways. At the same time, both the ruling parties and the majority of their voters are turning to Europe and the United States for inspiration, are concerned about the bad features of immigration (policies) in other countries, and agree that they do not want the same for Japan. Perhaps high-tech care robots and artificial intelligence will assist with jobs that people no longer have time to do.
Among the many German delegations that regularly make their way to beautiful Japan from the Bundestag, political parties, and state legislatures, one hoped to find best practice examples of how to deal with low birth rates and low birth rates in its East Asian destination to find social aging at the beginning of this year. If that was indeed the intention, it would have been preferable to avoid the flights in order to safeguard the environment. But perhaps the story of Japan will at least remind the German guests of what might happen when vital issues are ignored at round tables.
The author Dr. Axel Klein is a political scientist and professor of Japanese politics at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.
Source: Journal für Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft (IPG)