Marriage holds key to Japan’s falling births
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Between 2019 and 2021 the annual number of Japanese marriages plunged by almost a sixth to just over half a million. Not too surprising, perhaps, because the anti-gathering strictures of the pandemic years were disastrous for dating and weddings.
Alarmingly, though, there has been no rebound. The spring wedding season is around the corner, and it will have to be truly spectacular to put Japan back on nuptial track. More spectacular, certainly, than any democratic government could ever expect to engineer.
After a very modest recovery when Japan resumed business as usual in 2022, the number of marriages in 2023 dropped to below half a million for the first time since the mid-1930s.
Last month Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare issued the preliminary figures for births in Japan in 2023: a 5.1 per cent decrease from the previous year and a new record low of 758,631.
The country has grown accustomed to these numbers confirming a relentless story of falling births and, more generally, of population decline. But these were unsettling.
In its most recent forecasts, Japan’s National Institute of Population and Social Security Research had expected the number to fall to 755,000 in 2035. It is now basically there a good decade ahead of schedule.
The relationship between falling marriages and falling births is cemented in Japan by a key data point. For many decades, the ratio of children born in Japan out of wedlock has hovered just above 2 per cent — the lowest of all OECD countries, where the average rate is about 42 per cent.
Stable, long-lasting Japanese marriages, despite the many financial and other issues cited by couples as an impediment to having large families, are pretty consistent producers of about 1.9 children.
Put very simply, to produce a bigger annual cohort of babies, Japan needs more and longer-lasting marriages, preferably by people starting younger.
As an ambition (if that is what Japan’s politicians decide it must be) the idea of fighting the societal trend towards marrying later and less is as grand and interventionist as they come. As a policy, it will require ingenuity of a type most developed countries have yet to demonstrate.
Japan has been worried about its demographics for many years and invested plenty of effort into policies ostensibly aimed at persuading Japanese to have more children. The latest package, introduced in 2023 by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, was championed with rhetoric of extreme urgency. This, he suggested, was very much a last roll of the dice if Japanese society wanted to continue living the way it currently does.
Policymakers in the rest of the world would be wise to take note. How Japan handles its demographic challenges — the many consequences of an ageing, shrinking population — are relevant to an increasingly large cohort of developed countries around the world experiencing similar trends, and seeing versions of Japan’s travails in their own present or future.
The Kishida package was essentially a turbocharging of existing policies aimed, in effect, at encouraging already married people to have larger families. As ever, the policies were constructed around polls that show people’s main reasons for not having more children are economic.
Given the strains on the public purse, it was bold. There was an increase in the benefits for men and women who take childcare leave after a birth, meaning that they will be paid 100 per cent of their pre-leave wages during their time away from work.
Families will now receive child allowances on offspring up to the age of 18 and more will be paid to households with three or more children. State health insurance will be extended to cover childbirth expenses. The biggest new measure was also financial and involved the provision of childcare-leave benefits for non-regular workers and the self-employed.
At one level, this looks committed: the package directly addresses a number of areas that repeatedly come up as causes for reluctance to produce larger families. They may indeed ensure that the fertility rate creeps a little higher.
But at another, it clarifies the limitations on a government in such a situation. If boosting fertility rates had simply been about improving the economic lot of parents, why not pull out all the economic stops sooner? The answer may be that Japan’s government knows, deep down, that marriage is what counts and it cannot play matchmaker.
Letter in response to this column:
Why there’s a mismatch in Japan’s marriage market / From Professor John Bateson, Honorary Professor of Management, Bayes Business School, Wendover, Buckinghamshire, UK
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