Falling Birth Rate

The dearth of births

Why are so few young Japanese willing to procreate?

A special report on Japan

Nov 18th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION

from PRINT EDITION | Special reports

AT 84, Masuyo Hirano happily describes herself as in "the spring of my life." The sprightly woman lives in a nursing home with 50 other pensioners. But she is not idle. She votes. She does acupuncture. She and her friends sing karaoke, their delicate hands wrapped around the microphone. She dexterously weaves slippers from multicoloured ribbons that take days to finish, and hands them out to visitors like sweets.

There are two reasons for her happiness. The first is that she has made satisfactory arrangements for the remainder of her long life. In a country where 28m people are over 65 and many millions live alone, are bedridden or suffer from dementia, she has found herself a place that is a model of public-private care and will look after her until she dies. She has no children, and will not need to ask her relatives to do anything further for her.

The second reason she is happy is that she knows what will happen to her remains after her death. The Yashioen nursing home in Saitama, a district north of Tokyo, offers her a burial club in which she and her friends will be placed in the same tomb together, which the nursing home promises to tend. This sort of service is likely to become more popular in Japan as elderly people have fewer children to mourn them. Many Japanese in their later years are tormented by the prospect of lying in a lonely and forgotten tomb. "I've talked this over at length with my nephews and nieces," she says. "I don't want to be a burden on them."

When Ms Hirano was born in 1926, her parents' generation was not expected to live beyond 50. Today her age is nothing exceptional; life expectancy for women is 86 and for men 80. Japan has known for decades that it was getting older. Its growing life expectancy, now the longest in the world, was a cause for celebration as far back as 1962, when a special report by The Economist described it as possibly "one of the most exciting and extraordinary sudden forward leaps in the entire economic history of the world". The fruits of this success are now known as "hyper-ageing": no other country has grown so old so rapidly. The median age is approaching 50. That is surpassed only by Monaco, a Mediterranean retreat for wealthy pensioners.

Some of the stories about Japan's enduring centenarians need to be taken with a pinch of salt. This summer Tokyo's supposedly oldest man, 111-year-old Sogen Kato, turned out to be a heap of bones covered in newspapers dating from 1978. His daughter, now 81, had been collecting his pension for decades. That event turned up a few similar cases. But for all the "missing" centenarians, there are still reckoned to be about 40,000 bona fide ones. So many have reached the age of 100 that the silver sake cups they are customarily awarded have been reduced in size.

The darker side of that heartening picture of longevity is Japan's shrinking birth rate, which at 1.4 per woman is the second-lowest in the rich world, after South Korea's. From the start of the Meiji period in 1868 Japan's population rose for about 70 years. During that time Japan cast off its isolationist feudal system, opened its borders and started its headlong rush to industrialisation. Then, in the 1950s, fertility started to plummet. Since the 1980s, when the birth rate fell below 1.5 children per woman, Japan has, in effect, had a one-child policy—though, unlike in China, it was self-imposed.

It came as a shock to demographers when the 2005 census showed that the number of deaths exceeded that of births for the first time: the population had started to shrink two years ahead of schedule. The 2010 census results are currently being processed and preliminary results are due in February 2011.

Go on, have another one

Since the mid-1970s, when it became clear that the number of births was resolutely declining, Japanese governments have made efforts to encourage people to have more babies. But for all that they have increased child benefits and provided day-care centres in the past 30 years, the birth rate has remained stubbornly low. One reason is that in Japan, unlike in the West, marriage is still more or less a prerequisite for having children. Only 2% of births take place out of wedlock. And weddings cost a lot of money. The more elaborate sort may involve renting a chocolate-box "church" and hiring or buying at least three bridal outfits. The average cost of a Japanese wedding is about ¥3.2m ($40,000).

Having gone to all that trouble, married couples do, in fact, have an average of slightly more than two children, just above what is needed for births to exceed deaths. The trouble is that fewer and fewer people get married. Women wait ever longer and increasingly do not bother at all. According to the NIPSSR, six out of ten women in their mid- to late 20s, which used to be the peak child-bearing age, are still unwed. In 1970 the figure was two out of ten. And almost half the men between 30 and 34 were unmarried in 2005, more than three times as many as 30 years ago.

But the cost of weddings may be the least of the reasons why the Japanese are increasingly putting off marriage or avoiding it altogether. One weightier one is that employment rates among women have increased but private companies implicitly discourage mothers from returning to their old jobs. Toshiaki Tachibanaki, an economist who has written on inequality among Japanese women, finds that about 80% of female civil servants return to their old jobs after having children because they get reasonable maternity benefits and help with child care. But in private companies they are typically less well looked after, and only about a third go back to work.

So most women are forced to take low-paid irregular or part-time jobs after having children. NIPSSR figures show that the vast majority of working women aged 35-49 have jobs of that kind, earning ¥500,000-1.5m a year. Most men in the same age group work in regular jobs (with fringe benefits) and are paid ¥3m-6m.

It does not help that unemployment is high and incomes are low among the young—especially among young men, who increasingly give up even looking for jobs. One of Japan's most prominent sociologists, Masahiro Yamada of Chuo University, thinks that most young Japanese women still want to be housewives, but are struggling to find a breadwinner who earns enough to support them. He points out that half the young people of prime marrying age—20-34—still live with their parents. In the 1990s he coined the term "parasite singles" to describe them. They seemed to be getting a good deal, saving money on rent and spending it on foreign travel and luxury goods instead. If they wanted privacy, they could always go to one of Japan's ubiquitous love hotels.

Leave me alone

Since then the "parasites" have got older, and a lot of them are living with their parents not because they want to but because they cannot afford to live independently. They are moving towards middle age but have remained single, working for low pay or unemployed. Some have even become what Mr Yamada calls "pension parasites", living on their parents' pensions.

Part of the problem may be that young men, who during Japan's free-wheeling boom era rarely saw their workaholic fathers, do not want to fall into the same trap. Some of them have become "grass-eating men" who prefer clothes and cosmetics to cars and avoid life in the fast lane. Others resort to hikikomori, locking themselves in their bedrooms and refusing to talk to anyone, even the parents who deliver food to them. Many of them have watched their mothers divorce their fathers on retirement. Those men are cruelly known as "dead wet leaves", whose wives have trouble sweeping them out of the home. The Japanese are also learning from personal experience that looking after elderly parents can be more costly and time-consuming than looking after children. That may be another factor in their calculations.

Florian Coulmas of the German Institute for Japanese Studies in Tokyo, who has made a special study of population issues in Japan, has no easy explanations for the low birth rate, but describes it as the "bitter fruit of success" in Japanese demography. "A growing percentage of the population, both married and never married, without children has no vested interest in society, with hitherto unknown consequences for its self-image and sense of purpose," he writes. And even if policymakers managed to reverse those choices and persuade the Japanese to have many more children, the benefits to the workforce would not be felt for 20 years.