What should Tokyo do? After hovering around zero growth in the late 2000s, Japan’s population has been declining since 2010, and the decline has accelerated in recent years. Beating its own record every year for the last 10 years, the country saw another record population loss of 644,000 people in 2020-2021. The population is projected to decline well into the century, to about 88 million in 2065, a 30% decline in 45 years.
The rapid decline in the Japanese population is mainly due to persistent low fertility. Japan’s fertility rate has been declining since the mid-1970s, reaching a total fertility rate (TFR) of around 1.3 children per woman in the early 2000s. Japan’s TFR reached a low of 1.26 in 2005, but there was a modest recovery to a TFR of about 1.4 in the 2010s.
Motherhood outside of marriage is rare in Japan. Births out of wedlock have made up around 2% of all births since the 1950s. The decline in the fertility rate in Japan is mainly due to fewer young women marrying.
While the proportion of never married women in their prime reproductive age of 25-34 had been stable until the mid-1970s, the proportion of single women aged 25-29 rose from 21% in 1975 to 66% in 2020. The corresponding proportion of women aged 30 to 34 experienced an even more dramatic jump, from 8% to 39%.
Young Japanese women are increasingly reluctant to marry and have children, in part due to rapidly improving economic opportunities. The participation of women in four-year colleges began to increase rapidly in the late 1980s and reached 51% in 2020. The employment rate of young women also increased considerably. The labor participation rate for women aged 25 to 29 nearly doubled, from 45% in 1970 to 87% in 2020.
The decline in the marriage rate in Japan is also attributable to the persistence of traditional domestic gender roles, which place a heavy burden on women in managing household chores and childcare. Japanese men’s contribution to housework remains very low and the gender imbalance in housework is still notable.
The persistence of unequal gender roles in the home, in the face of expanding economic opportunities for women, has made reconciling work and family life very difficult for married women, diminishing the attractiveness of marriage .
Concerned about the social and economic consequences associated with prolonged low fertility and a rapidly aging population, the Japanese government launched a series of programs to address low fertility (“shoushika-taisaku”) in the mid-1990s. The initial goal was to provide child-rearing support by increasing the supply of childcare services and advocating for a better balance between work and family life.
Alarmed by declining fertility rates and the onset of demographic decline in the late 2000s, Japan’s political efforts have become broader. Japanese governments have advocated a long-term aid policy from birth to youth. In the 2010s, low fertility became an integral part of Japan’s general public policy direction. Low fertility policies were incorporated into Japan’s macroeconomic policy, national land planning, and regional and local development.
Despite these continuing and extensive efforts to increase the fertility rate, Japan’s policies have failed to increase fertility to mitigate the social and economic effects of a declining and aging population. Still, Japan’s policies have halted a further decline in the fertility rate. Unlike other East Asian economies such as South Korea and Taiwan, whose fertility rate in 2021 fell to 0.81 and 1.07, respectively, Japan’s remained at 1.30.
Japan’s experience shows how difficult it is to restore fertility to replacement level, especially when a country has a sizeable population and a persistently low birth rate. It also seems unrealistic to counter Japan’s rapid demographic decline by immediately and drastically increasing international migration by liberalizing the country’s immigration policies. The number of deaths in Japan is expected to increase in the coming decades due to the increase in the elderly population.
That means the country has no choice but to redouble efforts to maintain and hopefully increase fertility. To do this, Tokyo must help women and couples balance their work and family roles to alleviate the heavy social and economic costs associated with population decline.
The Japanese labor market needs to be more family-friendly, while gender roles in the home need to be less traditional. Even if political efforts to make the workplace more family-friendly and the home more equal fail to increase fertility and stem population decline, they are likely to improve the well-being of Japanese families by improving the quality of life. of family life.
Information of: 19fortyfive.com
Photo credits: splash
