The Daily - A Shrinking Society in Japan

Episode Date: May 5, 2021

Japan is the “grayest” nation in the world. Close to 30 percent of the population is over 65. The reason is its low birthrate, which has caused the population to contract since 2007.With the birthrate in the United States also dropping, what are the implications of a shrinking population, and what lessons can be learned from Japan?Guest: Motoko Rich, the Tokyo bureau chief for The New York Times.  Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: The contracting population in Japan poses a serious threat to the country’s economic vitality and the security of its social safety net.As Japan’s population shrinks and ages, rural areas are emptying out. In one childless village, two dozen adults compensate for the absence with the company of hundreds of giant handmade dolls.The birthrate in the United States declined for the sixth straight year in 2020 and has fallen by about 19 percent since its recent peak in 2007.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. On yesterday's show, Sabrina Tavernisi described why, for the first time in generations, the birth rate in the United States has been falling, and the long-term risks posed by that trend. and the long-term risks posed by that trend. One of those risks is that the U.S. could eventually follow the path of a country like Japan, where a persistently low birth rate has resulted in a shrinking population that grows smaller and smaller by the year.

Today, I turn to Tokyo Bureau Chief Motoko Rich to understand what that change has looked and felt like inside Japan. It's Wednesday, May 5th. Motoko, tell me about this town that you had visited. So it's a little town called Nagoro. It's on the island of Shikoku, and it's pretty remote. Japan's not that big of a country, and yet it seemed to take a really long time to get here. We flew from Tokyo to this, you know, medium-sized city called Kochi. And then from there, we have to take a train and then a bus.

And we're clearly just moving further and further away from known civilization. There are no convenience stores, no gas stations. And then you finally get to this little remote village. And what is it like there? So it's kind of eerie because you're driving into town and you've already been coming up these winding roads and signs of civilization have been disappearing. And you start to see these figures, one perched on a little wall on the side of the road. There's what appears to be an old woman crouched over in a field. There looks like this guy is kind of shaking chestnuts out of a tree.

There are a couple of construction workers on a cigarette break. And it's really, I don't know, profoundly sort of sad and moving to see all this. As I walk around town, I keep seeing these people out of the corner of my eye, and I think they're real people. You see, they all have like button eyes, little mouths. They're actually quite lifelike. And you realize they're all dolls.

Dolls. Dolls, yeah. Human-sized dolls. Stuffed dolls. Stuffed dolls, like oversized cloth dolls. Huh. Dozens and dozens and dozens of these life-sized dolls. Huh. Dozens and dozens and dozens of these life-size dolls.

Like a mom, a dad, a kid, a little baby. Dolls everywhere. And what's even more eerie is that there's a school in the middle of the town and, you know, it just looks like a big school building with a big gravel yard in front. Then you go upstairs and there are a couple of classrooms and you peek in and they're filled with dolls.

It turns out that this is a village that only has about two dozen adults and there are no children. And there's this woman, Kimi Ayano, who's decided to kind of fill the place with dolls. So why is it that there are so few people in this town? How is it that it has basically become a town of dolls? So basically, the birth rate in Nagato has just fallen to zero. There are no children in this town at all, and there haven't been since the last two graduated from elementary

school in 2012. Most of the people there are just old. And that's kind of emblematic of what's going on in the rest of Japan. Japan is technically the grayest country in the world. Close to 30% of the population is over 65. And the population is shrinking. It's been shrinking since 2007. And you have this overhang of a lot of old people, which in and of itself is not a problem, except that if you don't have enough young people to work, to pay taxes, to work in the nursing homes, you've got this imbalance. And how did Japan get to this stage of having such a low birth rate? Well, I think it's a long story and you have to kind of back up a little bit. Japan rose from the ashes of World War II.

So after the war, Japan was determined to come roaring back. It grew into the world's second largest economy, thanks to the diligence of its people and the strong bonds between management and workers. And the way they sort of did that was through this social contract that they had, mainly with men, which is that if you went to work for a company, you would devote your life to that. You would work morning, noon, and night, as long hours as demanded by the company, and you'd become the salaryman in an exchange for which you were guaranteed lifetime employment. You knew you had job security. You knew you'd get your raises and your promotions as you got older until you retired.

So this is the birth of Japan's notoriously intense work culture where people, overwhelmingly men, seem to put work at the center of their lives. Exactly. And at the same time, you often would get married and you'd have a wife who was at home tending the home fires, taking care of the house, taking care of the children. Gotcha. And then in the 1970s, as in many other places around the world,

women start to enter the workforce. Mostly unmarried women who were working until they got married. But then there were some women who wanted to work longer than that. And then the economy was really doing well and going strong and Japan was booming. As Japanese people devoted themselves to the money game. Japanese companies were buying up real estate in Manhattan and buying up companies all over America and everybody was writing books about how we were going to get our lunch eaten by Japan. The real estate and stock markets shot up, creating a bubble. And then everything came crashing to a halt in the early 90s. And a prolonged period of stagnation set in. It's been called the lost 20 years.

So at that point, a lot of men who had previously had all these really cushy, secure, lifelong employment jobs were either thrown out of the jobs or their wages were completely stagnating. And so to keep families afloat, more and more women entered the workforce. And what does that do to the birth rate in Japan? So at that point, the birth rate does start to fall because instead of the women only being at home, they're working, helping the country try and recover from this crash, keeping their families afloat. And at first, I don't think people see this as a particular problem. Japan is a very crowded, populous country.

And fewer people being born at the time I don't think was seen as such a big deal. Right. It's kind of seen as a necessary tradeoff. Right. They're trying to get the economy back on its feet. Okay. So then what happens? So this is a pretty long period of stagnation for Japan. They're having a really hard time climbing out of this bust. And during this period, a lot of the men are starting to feel very insecure because either they can't get a good job or even if they have what's considered a decent job, their wages are not increasing.

So they're feeling like, oh, maybe I shouldn't get married because I don't think that I can support a wife and a family. And that, of course, leads to even more decline in the birth rate. So suddenly more women are working, which has an impact on the birth rate. And then it sounds like men are not working as much or are working but are financially insecure, so they are not inclined to have children. Exactly. And as all of this is happening, there's one thing that isn't changing, and this is this very deeply entrenched cultural pattern that when couples do have children, the women do all the work at home.

And when you say all the work at home. So I moved to Japan in the summer of 2016, and I'm a working mom myself, and my husband's great. He cooks dinner and he does laundry. But of course, like any couple with two children, we sometimes argue about who's doing what and who's doing more. Right. But when I looked around, I noticed no comparison with Japanese women. They were pretty much doing everything. And it wasn't just that they were doing all the work at home. It was that the expectations of what moms should do were much higher than anything that I had experienced as a working mom in the States.

What do you mean? So, for example, at daycare, one of the things that's required is that the parents, and it's always the mom, has to keep a log. Every morning and every evening, she has to record what they ate, what their moods were, what time they went to sleep. This is every day that you're putting this down in a little notebook. And that just seemed to me like a whole bunch of extra labor for the mom. And then she's also, you know, instead of sending the kid in an outfit that they might come home with paint splattered and dirt on it, they're sending them three outfits so that they can change.

They're washing their sneakers at the end of every week. They're washing their whole set of change of sheets and blankets. The other thing that you notice when you're just walking around Japan and you look at all the apartment buildings, if you look on the balconies, everybody's got laundry hanging out. And that's because most middle class families and even some fairly wealthy families don't have dryers. So that makes doing a load of laundry that much more work. And so there are all these women that are hanging laundry at night. And as a reporting project, I sort of became obsessed with really diving into this. What is it like to be a working mother in Japan?

What specifically they were doing and why it was that they seemed so harried and overburdened. And so I spent a lot of time hanging out at daycare centers and talking to women as they came for pickup because it usually was mostly women. And then this one woman, Kazuko Yoshida, agreed to let us spend quite a lot of time with her. So one weekday, a photographer and I went to her apartment. We got there around 6. And she and her husband are there with the two kids, and they're getting ready for work. But, you know, I notice little things, right?

He's sitting at the table with the kids, and she's rushing around. She's cooking the breakfast. She's clearing the table. She's packing their bags. And then it the table. She's packing their bags. And then it comes time to take them to daycare. And he says, okay, I'm going to take the kids to daycare. So in my mind, that means he's going to take the kids to daycare on his own. It turns out that he's going to accompany her to take the kids to daycare.

Why can't he do it himself? He just feels really anxious and insecure about it. And so he said he just didn't feel that he could handle these two young children on his own, that he could help his wife, but he couldn't do it by himself. You know, the youngest is a baby, the older is a toddler, wrangling two kids. You know, it's a lot of work. I get it. But still, he just didn't think he could handle it. And so we accompanied Miss Yoshida to work.

She takes us into her office. She's a graphics designer. She lets us look around. And then we say, you know what? We're going to come back and pick you up when you leave work so that we can go with you to pick up at daycare because she's going to definitely do pick up because her husband's going to be working late. So we get there to pick up at daycare because she's going to definitely do pickup because her husband's going to be working late. So we get there to pick her up. We get to the station and we're about to get on the train to go pick up her kids. And she's like, let's let a train go by. So we let one train

go by. She's like, let's let another train go by. Why? She said, this is the only time during the day that I have to myself. This is pretty intense. It is very intense. And in fact, a lot of women who are still trying to decide what they want to do with their lives are looking at that model and saying, I'm not sure I want that.

There might be another way. And that other way means that a lot of women are either not getting married at all, or even if they're getting married, they're not having children. Huh. They're basically opting out of motherhood because of the version of motherhood that they see in the culture. Exactly. We'll be right back. Motoko, you said that a big reason why Japanese women are opting out of motherhood is because so much of the burden of parenting falls on women.

So how widespread is this opting out phenomenon? So the proportion of women who've never been married is higher than it's ever been. And it's really interesting. I started to explore this partly because when I first came to Japan, every once in a while, my husband and I would go out on a Friday night and we'd look around in the restaurants and everywhere we looked, it was all these groups of single women. And they look like they're really having a great time. There were no men around. And I thought, okay, well, what's going on here? It's not like you never see that in the West, but I just didn't see all that many couples. And it just seemed like there was this very

segregated social life. So I wanted to find out what was going on there. And as I started to talk to a lot of single women, it turned out that there's this whole kind of infrastructure that's growing around the fact that women have decided to opt out of marriage. They are working, so they have a good income. There are these like solo karaoke bars or centers where they have woman-only sections with these single booths where these women can go in and sing their hearts out. There are these restaurants where they're for yakiniku, where women go and they're kind of grilling their own meat at their table.

And that used to be kind of a thing that you would do. You'd go sit at a group table. But there are these restaurants now where they have these like solo booths for people to sit. There are even like these photo studios where you can go get a wedding portrait taken. You know, you get dressed up in the wedding dress, but you're not getting married. It's called like a solo wedding photo. A solo wedding photo. Exactly.

I mean, that's a bit of an oxymoron, but I guess a celebration of a non-marriage. Exactly. There are women who are like, I love the dress. I love the idea of being celebrated. I love the idea of looking more beautiful than I'll ever look. I want to memorialize my youth in this beautiful dress with this beautiful photo, but I don't need the actual So this phenomenon is so widespread that the culture is adjusting to women not wanting to be married. And, you know, in fairness, it's not necessarily that they're always saying, I don't want to be married. But they're making these choices. They want to work. They want to have a good time.

They don't want to be trapped in these situations where they're at home all the time and not having fun, and that if they do have children, they're doing all the work. And so sometimes it's more tacit, it's more subliminal, but they are drifting away from these traditional family structures. And I imagine all these unmarried women are, of course, not having that many children. Right. And it's pretty striking how many unmarried women there are now. So, 20 years ago, if you looked at the cohort of women between the ages of 35 and 39, only 10% had never been married. And fast forward to today, that's nearly a quarter of those women have never been married. So, more than double.

Exactly. There are a lot of single women now. So more than double. Exactly. There are a lot of single women now. So in that prime childbearing phase of life, a full one quarter of Japanese women are unmarried and therefore unlikely to have children. Correct. What's interesting about the portrait you're painting

is that up to a point, it resembles changes in the West. Women going to work, liking that work, making decisions based around the fact that they want to be co-equals in earning. And yet, that change in countries like the U.S. is accompanied by a kind of redistribution of parenting responsibilities and domestic work. And it seems like Japan only had half the revolution. The women go to work, but then things don't change at home the way they have in many parts of the world. Right. So interestingly, women are working so much that the labor force participation rate among women in Japan is higher than it is even in the United States. And yet, among women in Japan is higher than it is even in the United States. And yet, women are doing the vast majority of the work at home and the men are still doing so little. So, check this statistic

out. Men in Japan do, on average, 41 minutes a day of housework and childcare. And that compares to men in the U.S. who are doing just under two and a half hours of housework and child care a day. Wow. So a very meaningful difference. Yeah. And by the way, that figure for Japan is the lowest among the wealthiest countries in the world. So in Japan right now, you have one of the highest workforce participations of women and lowest domestic participation from men. I mean, that's a huge disjunction. You could probably say it's the biggest gap in the world. So now that there is this phenomenon of women opting out of this gap

that you have just described, not wanting to perpetuate it and therefore not have children, what are the implications of this incredibly low birth rate that you have described? Well, one of the most obvious and biggest implications is that you suddenly have this society in which everyone is old. According to the United Nations, its population is the oldest in the world. There was a time when it looked like Japan

would become the number one economic power in the world. Under a million babies born just last year. And when you have fewer people being born... And you do not have consumption. And old people do not consume. You have fewer people growing up to become workers, and that means you have fewer people contributing to the social security system that you need

to sustain this growing population of old people. The benefits are going to the elder generation, whereas the burden is borne by the working and young generation. And you also have fewer people to become doctors and nurses and home health aides, caregivers. As the elderly population increases, more staff are required to treat them. This is creating a growing financial burden for hospitals.

And is that showing up in the Japanese economy? Absolutely. Japanese employers are desperate for workers, particularly in areas that are very labor intensive. So given that this demographic problem, this low birth rate, is now understood to be causing this economic problem in Japan, what is Japan doing about it? So a couple things. One is that after years and years of resisting, Japan is slowly starting to open its borders and allow non-Japanese people to move here, but in a pretty limited way. So a couple of years ago— Japan's parliament has passed a new law. Parliament passed a law opening the door to nearly 350,000 foreign workers in a country where immigration

has long been taboo. That allowed a new category of visas for people from other countries to come in and work. Both blue collar and skilled workers will be allowed in under different schemes. And the conditions for coming in were pretty stark. So people who get these visas can only stay for five years. They're not allowed to bring their families. There's a pretty high bar that they have to learn to speak Japanese. So I think it's going to be quite difficult for them to attract a lot of people to take these jobs. And even if they do, they're only issuing 350,000 visas over five years, which is kind of a drop in the bucket for the need.

Just to be sure I understand this, despite having a population crisis, Japan is letting immigrants in, but they cannot bring their families, who I imagine would help them procreate? That's how inhospitable Japan is to people who aren't Japanese. I think it's sort of a fear-based idea that we don't want people to put down roots here. Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe would not use the word immigration, and he often would say,

this is not an immigration policy. It's a foreign worker policy. So I think it was designed specifically to allay fears that Japan would become a nation of immigrants, which is something that I wouldn't say a majority, but certainly a very large and vocal segment of the population does not want. And then the other solution to the economic problem, sort of ironically, is this notion of getting more women to go to work. sort of ironically, is this notion of getting more women to go to work.

When Prime Minister Abe came into office, he said one of the things he wanted to do to pull the economy out of a long period of stagnation was to push and empower women. And so he called this policy womanomics. It's an idea that's known as womenomics. Womenomics is the name for Abe's policy to close Japan's gender gap. An ambitious plan to boost the number of female managers by 30 percent in four years. And the idea is if more women are working, you have this sort of untapped pool of highly educated, talented, native-born workers here in Japan. And so he was saying we need more women to go to work. But of course, the problem with that, as we've seen, is that when the women go

to work, they either decide that they like working so much that they don't want to get married and have children, or if they're working and they also have children, it's so difficult to combine the two that it's certainly not an incentive to have a lot of children. Right, so neither of the programs that you have just identified would seem to do almost anything to increase the birth rate. It might temporarily improve the economy, but if the long-term problem in Japan is that not enough babies are being born, neither of these things is going to do all that much to change that. Right. So the thing that would really change things

is a dramatic shift in the culture. And we're starting to see really tiny baby steps. Sometimes on the weekend, you'll see dads, the playground with their kids. You hear of fathers that are learning to cook, do more housework. And then you have this politician. He's actually the son of a former prime minister who was pretty famous, well-known friend of George Bush, Junichiro Koizumi. His son, Shinjiro Koizumi, who's now the environment minister. His wife was pregnant when they got married. And he announced right before the baby was born that he was going to take paternity leave. But when he first announced that he was considering taking paternity leave, believe it or not, he got a lot of blowback.

So there were some conservative politicians who said, you know, this is a sign that he's not very serious about his job. And on social media, people were criticizing him for even daring to suggest that he might take paternity leave. How dare he? That kind of stuff. So it took him a while to actually firmly announce that he definitely was planning to do it. And then when the baby was born, here's what he did. He took two weeks over a course of three months, and he said he was going to be kind of telecommuting for part of that. So this was definitely paternity leave light.

Absolutely. You know, a significant gesture. But like you said, paternity leave light. And what did that episode tell you? Well, on the one hand, it feels like there's an effort to try. His father certainly didn't take paternity leave. There was never any question that he would take leave when his children were born. So the fact that his son, a prominent politician, he's mooted as potentially being a future prime minister,

had decided that he would stake some of his political capital to take paternity leave is definitely a gesture of people trying to change the culture. On the other hand, the blowback that he got, the fact that he had to make a big deal of just taking two weeks off shows how difficult it is to change this really entrenched culture of what roles men and what roles women are supposed to play.

Motoko, I'm curious. What do you expect to happen to that town, now filled with more dolls than people, that you started our conversation describing? I think it's going to disappear. I mean, there are only two dozen people left. There's nobody of childbearing age left, so nobody's going to be having any more kids.

And they're all pretty old. So as they die off, the town will die off. And the only people left will be the dolls. Motoko, thank you very much. Thank you. The new Prime Minister of Japan, Yoshihide Suga, has said that raising the country's birth rate is a major priority and has pledged to make the country's national insurance system

pay for fertility treatments to encourage families to have more children. Japan's government now projects that unless the birth rate changes, the country's population, which now stands at 126 million, will fall below 100 million by 2053 and fall to 88 million by 2065. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, Pfizer, whose COVID-19 vaccine is expected to be authorized in the coming days

for adolescents between 12 and 15, said it would seek authorization to give the vaccine to children between the ages of 2 and 11 later this fall. So far, the FDA has authorized Pfizer's vaccine under a temporary emergency order and has yet to grant the vaccine full approval. During a call with investors, Pfizer said it would soon seek such approval from the government. its vaccine directly to consumers and could make it easier for companies, schools, and government agencies to require that workers be vaccinated before returning to work in person. Today's episode was produced by Bianca Gaver, Adisa Egan, Kelly Prime, and Alexandra Lee Young.

It was edited by Lisa Chow and engineered by Chris Ward. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.