Workers urged: Go home and multiply
 

Well once again Japan's birthrate and aging problem has made headline news. Companies at the request of the government are encouraging employees to go home early 2 days a week to spend time with their families and to make more babies.

For those of you who do not know Japan has a serious problem with their birthrate as it is the lowest in the world at 1.34 well below the 2.0 it needs to maintain the population. Add in the the fastest aging society in the world and you have the makings of a disaster waiting to happen. Japan wont even have enough citizens to work the jobs needed in the coming years.

I thinks its great the government is getting involved and trying to get the population to have more children (except for the Diet member who resigned because he called Japanese women baby making machines) but its going to take more than going home early 2 days a week to fix this problem. Its not just the long working hours but many other social problems and factors and i think many of these factors need to be addressed before a plan of action can be crafted to fix the problem. They are being encouraged to have more children during a economic downturn thats kind of ironic.

Any thoughts? speak up.

here is the article.
Workers urged: Go home and multiply - CNN.com

I've made it my personal mission to help with this crisis during my next visit to Japan. :D

I suppose *somebody* had to say that...:p

I'm working on it myself, my wife(japanese) is due in August.

Having talked to my wife a litle bit about this topic before, I don't really think the proposed solution will work. How she explained it is that after the first child many of the typical salaryman/housewife couples see their job as done with respect to having kids. Allready having a kid to carry on the family name and take care of them when they are older they pursue other activities and sometimes sex elsewhere. With that kind of perspective the only way is to change the burden of having kids and also the perspective of what it is to have kids.

First time I've ever heard something like this. Kinda' scary, but kinda' funny if you think about it:

"Gentlemen, we need to adjourn this meeting early because we all need to go have sex with our wives."
"I don't have a wife."
"Men, get Johnson here a wife. Then Johnson?"
"Yes?"
"Have sex with her."

haha that cracked me up.

2 more practical solutions.

-Increase immigration.
-Stop overworking people so that having and raising families is not such a burden.

The reason Japanese folks are having less kids is mostly economical, the way I see it. Raising a child is expensive in Japan, and when the economy suffers it is natural for people to "cut back".

Yep thats pretty much the main reason. Though Japans population did get better for a while but then suddenly it come crashing down again and continues to fall year after year. They are going to have a real problem maintaining their infrastructure after a while. When i spoke to some of my female Japanese friends about the subject i basically got these replies.

1.Who has time to have children.
2.Children are expensive.
3.I'm not married nor do i have the time to look for a spouse because of work.

Take a look at this graph its like upside down skyscraper just waiting to come crashing down.

The Japanese government needs to seriously push some incentives to move large companies OUT of Tokyo and more spread around Japan.

That would, in my opinion, make the biggest difference toward the population problem.

People move to where there is work - which ends up being a big city 95% of the time. This takes them away from their families and the social infrastructure they grew up in and are familiar with. They have no family support for a family (a big thing) and they have no space and money. Without friends and family around, there isn`t a whole lot to do but focus on work, so things just get worse.

Outside of the big cities, people have a decent number of kids. It`s just too expensive in the city - but unfortunately that is where the work is, so that`s where most people of childbearing age end up. If they were around their extended family, a lot of the issues and worry in regard to having a child would be reduced. But as things are - no work back by the family, but no space and money in the city.

I think I`ve posted about this multiple times in the past, but that one single sentence was taken so incredibly far out of context that it disgusts me - when what he was saying was INCREDIBLY accurate, and he had the best ideas I`d ever heard. Too bad mass media wanted to get worked up over something and decided to forget to broadcast anything but that half a sentence.

To quote my past post on the subject;

i think they have a high death rate also. people dying from over exhaustion, suicide, etc. that might be a problem.

Iv read multiple articles and research studies on this subject but i never get conclusive answers. I do know that there might be a problem with exhaustion and suicide from job related stress but i just dont know how big the problem is.

Since i do not live in Japan i do not have first hand information on the matter only what my friends tell me. A person who actually resides there like Nyororin might be best suited to address this. I know at one point some studies showed that Japan had the highest suicide rate in all the industrialized nations of the world but again i do not know how accurate that statement is.

I understand long working hours and days of no sleep. I work 12 hours a day almost 5 to 6 days a week depending on how much work i have to do but i have never entertained thoughts of ending my life over it.


NyororinI posted that comment to show some of the signs of the problem at hand and how media can and WILL take things to the extreme. The fact that one comment like that can start a frenzy about this subject shows there is a problem. I would have have worded it differently but thats just me i got the jist of what the gentlemen was trying to say.

I commented a while ago on old bureaucrats who like to sit around and discuss a whole lot of nothing and never consult those it directly effects about the problem at hand. I agree with your previous post consulting women would be a great step but is the government willing to put forth the effort?

but most deaths are from being overworked which is where the word "Karoshi" comes from. the article i read from said that family members had to pick up their parents or siblings from work so they dont hurt themselves. thats probably why the population in japan is small because people work more that they make kids.

Karōshi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I think that's good. The government is trying to help,
and having families together is never a bad thing. Is
it just for the men workers to go home early? or for
the women too? Because these days in other countries,
more and more women are working just as much as men.

Karoshi is not that common - there have only been a handful of documented cases. Although I`m sure that working long hours isn`t good for someone`s health.

I have yet to hear of people picking family members up from work so that they wouldn`t hurt themselves. If things were at that level, the company would make them take time off.

Overtime is a problem, yes, but it`s really not as bad as the western media likes to make it out to be. I know more people who work longer hours in the US than I do in Japan. But for some reason it`s "different" in the media`s eyes.

There are mandatory annual health checks, and a mandatory health check if you go over a certain number of hours of work in a month (including counseling, etc).

From what I`ve seen in my 10 years of living here, suicides are linked much more strongly to debt than any work related stress. Having a suicide or work related death linked to a company is a HUGE stigma, so there is a lot of effort to avoid it happening.

I find this all very interesting and I personally appreciate those that have commented on this with first hand experience.

If I may be so bold and ask Nyororin or whoever else happens to live in Japan some further questions about this.

1. How many children are considered a "large" family. (Here in the states I'd say its 4-5 but I guess that depends on your "class" standing)
2. At what age does the average Japanese woman get married? (I believe this is important because if they are getting married later, they are having kids(assuming they are waiting till marriage) later which translates to shorter amount of time to reproduce (if I remember the normal stopping point is about 40-45 I think, but I'm not a woman nor a Doctor so I'm just guessing, please don't shoot me)).
3. Last, which is looked more favorably upon, the working mother or the housewife?

Around here (AKA in a city)? Probably 3 and above. In the countryside though, 4 or 5. I`d say the suburb average is 2 kids, and the rural average is 3.
It seems to be pretty accepted to keep trying until you have at least one of each gender. If you get one of each right away (with 2 kids) then a lot of people stop then. But if they`re both the same gender, then it seems to be pretty common to have another.

Around here it is 26 to 28. Most women would like to be married and have their first baby before 30. I don`t know about out in the countryside... My husband and I got married extremely young by Japanese standards (21 and 20) so we didn`t have all that much contact with unmarried people of the same age. But when we all hit 26 or 27 - the number of marriages sort of exploded.

Housewife - hands down.
That is another reason for the low birthrate. Many (Likely most) couples strongly believe that the mother should stay at home with the children during their early years. And in the big city, where living costs are high, it`s just not feasible. So they wait, and wait until they feel they can make it on one salary.
In the past, back when people lived near their parents/families, this was a lot easier to pull off. A new baby would receive huge community support... But when your family lives 6 hours away things change.

That is one thing I have always liked about Japan's culture. Thankyou for your quick response. Now I can go to sleep.:D

I just found something interesting over at dannychoo
Ill quote him on this one:
"...I thought we'd look at how much it costs to send children to school in Japan.

Kindergarten (3 years - public): 729,962 yen
Kindergarten (3 years - private): 1,611,457 yen

Elementary (6 years - public): 2,003,070 yen
Elementary (6 years - private): 8,240,327 yen

Junior High (3 years - public): 1,414,387 yen
Junior High (3 years - private): 3,800,593 yen

High School (3 years - public): 1,561,758 yen
High school (3 years - private): 3,131,439 yen

Total for all public (15 years): 5,709,177 yen
Total for all private (15 years): 16,783,816 yen

University is not compulsory but for those wishing to go would spend an average of 5,000,000 yen for the 4 years."

I guess this might also be a good reason not to have another child....

The thing is, this hasn`t changed in recent years - so it`s hard to say that these costs are what are forcing people to cut back on making children.

To be completely honest though, the figures look scarier on paper than in reality. I used to gawk and choke at them until I actually had a kid and sent him to a private kindergarten. In our case, costing pretty much what is listed there.

It comes down to around 30000/month with 50000 a year for supplies. The uniform cost an arm and a leg, but it`s pretty much a one time deal. So - we pay that 30000/month for 3 years and then it`s off to elementary school.
These costs lists for elementary school tend to be VERY misleading. Public elementary is essentially free. All you pay for is basic supplies (crayons and all that junk) and lunch each day. Most of the time there is no uniform, so it`s all regular clothing which tends to inflate the "costs" as Japanese magazines and the like add in "clothing costs" as part of the cost of elementary school... When it`s really just the cost of having a kid to begin with. Our local elementary school is 3000/month for lunch, with an average of about 2000 more a month for other activities (a big field trip once a year, etc.) So that`s 5000/month plus the once a year cost of supplies. No way it goes over 25000/month (like in that listed cost) for a public school unless you are including all the general costs of raising a child.
If you sent your kid to kindergarten and paid 30000/month for it, just siphon off the remaining 25000/month you`re not paying in elementary school and save it for later (private high school, university).

It looks a lot worse on paper than it feels to be paying it in reality. We certainly aren`t making millions*, and are able to do it quite easily on one salary while paying a massive home loan each month and still have cash left over to play with.

*Unless you count yearly income in yen. We do makes millions of yen a year.