21adventure

Companies have been urged to give their employees more time off to procreate; shops have offered discounts for larger families; and the government has introduced child allowances to lift the birthrate.
Yet try as it may, Japan appears unable to stop its inexorable slide into long-term population decline.
With the global population forecast to reach 9 billion by the middle of the decade, Japan is bucking the trend. Instead, its low birthrate and ageing society are taking the world’s third-biggest economy to the brink of a demographic crisis to which it is struggling to find solutions.
The traditional pyramid population model is beginning to flip upside down against a backdrop of fewer, and later, marriages, while life expectancy continues to rise thanks to a traditional low-fat diet and advanced medical treatments paid for by universal health insurance.
Demographers warn that if current trends continue, Japan’s population will look much smaller and greyer in just a few decades.
Although the population increased slightly last year to just over 128 million, according to government figures, the most recent census attributes the rise to more people returning to Japan than had left.
The long-term trend points to an accelerated decline. The current population will dip below 100 million in 2046, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research in Tokyo, before sinking to below 45 million in 2105.
For many Japanese, coupling appears to be low on the agenda: a 2008 survey conducted by Durex found that the average Japanese couple has sex 45 times a year, less than half the global average of 103 times.
The birthrate, at 1.34 – the average number of children a woman is expected to have during her child-bearing years – is below the 2.1 experts say is necessary to keep the population stable.
“Even that is a conservative estimate,” says Futoshi Ishii, a researcher in population dynamics at the institute, who adds that it is too early to gauge the impact on the birth rate of the recent introduction of allowances for children up to the age of 15.
Local authorities and the private sector have attempted to encourage couples to have more children, from offering shopping vouchers to larger families to launching officially sanctioned matchmaking websites.
The country’s biggest business lobby, Keidanren, has encouraged its 1,600 member firms to allow employees to spend more time with their spouses and, so the theory goes, have more children.
Yet appeals to promote a healthier work-life balance are unlikely to produce results until corporate gimmicks such as “family weeks” – when firms send workers home by 7pm at the latest – are legally enforced.
In addition, more than 40% of men aged 35-39 still live with their parents. Many cite job instability and a culture of work that leaves them with little time to meet potential marriage partners.
As a result there were fewer marriages in 2010 than at any time since 1954, and there has been a noticeable shift towards living alone.
“People are marrying much later, and that causes an inevitable slowdown in the birthrate,” says Ishii. “That may change of course, but we believe the trend towards having fewer children will continue for the foreseeable future.”
The current government, led by the left-of-centre Democratic Party of Japan, swept to office in August 2009 armed with ambitious spending plans designed to ease the financial burden on families.
To encourage spending and, it is hoped, more procreation, families have received monthly allowances of 13,000 yen per child since April 2010.
But the initiative is one of several DPJ policies to have fallen victim to Japan’s perilous public finances and the cost – estimated at 19 trillion yen over five years – of rebuilding the region destroyed by the March earthquake and tsunami.
A doubling of the allowance planned for this year was never implemented, and the prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, has agreed to review child allowance and other pledges in an attempt to win opposition support for extra disaster budgets and tax reforms.
The double-whammy of a low birth rate and bigger elderly population raises the question of how Japan – which already has the highest public debt in the industrialised world – will fund state pensions and meet health and social security costs.
There has been little serious discussion about relaxing immigration laws. “One possible solution would be to bring in a large number of foreigners to perform jobs in which there are labour shortages,” says Ishii. “But Japan does not have a history of mass immigration, and the consensus is that it isn’t a desirable way forward.”
Until recently, politicians were similarly reluctant to discuss tax rises that could cost them votes. But faced with a huge post-disaster reconstruction bill and resistance to issuing new debt, Japan’s leaders are finally talking about doubling the current consumption [sales] tax to 10%, partly to help fund welfare.
The problem is being compounded by impressive longevity statistics in Japan, where more than a fifth of the population is over 65.
Women can expect to live, on average, 86.4 years, and men for 79.6 years. The country has more than 40,000 centenarians, more than triple the number a decade ago. According to one projection, more than half a million Japanese will be over 100 by the middle of the century.
By contrast, the number of 20-year-olds is expected to fall rapidly over the next 30 years, sinking to just 780,000 by 2040.
Other countries in the region are experiencing similar demographic problems. South Korea is finding that the price of a successful economy driven by youthful dynamism is a shrinking population and a potential cash crunch. Over the past four decades, it has gone from having one of the highest birthrates among OECD countries to one of the lowest.
What follows is expected to mirror Japan’s experience: labour shortages, higher public debt and soaring pension and health insurance costs.
In just seven years’ time, 14% of South Korea’s population of just under 50 million will be over 65, according to the Samsung Economic Research Institute. By the middle of the century, it will have the highest proportion of senior citizens in the world, the institute adds