Japan has fewer babies because young people aren't good lovers, politician says
A Japanese politician has claimed the nation's plummeting marriage and birth rates are not due to the high cost of having a family but because young people lack "romantic ability".
Narise Ishida, a member of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in the Mie Prefectural Assembly, said at a local government meeting on February 24 that it should carry out a survey to determine residents' "romantic ability", the Mainichi newspaper reported. He did not elaborate how an individual's propensity for passion would be tested in wooing a partner or how that data might help to reverse the nation's shortage of babies.
"The birth rate is not declining because it costs money to have children," Ishida told the chamber. "The problem is that romance has become a taboo subject before marriage."
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Ishida's comments come after Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced that Japan is to dramatically ramp up the amount it spends encouraging people to have more children as the nation "is on the brink" of a population crisis.
In recent decades, Japanese have been getting married later in life and are opting to have fewer children, primarily a result of financial pressures.
"He is correct in perhaps one way, that young people today lack traditional communication skills, but this is a generation that communicates very well online and through social media," said Makoto Watanabe, a professor of media and communications at Hokkaido Bunkyo University in Sapporo.
"Among my students I see them constantly showing 'romantic abilities' through modern technology, which may be why Ishida cannot see it happening," he said.
Watanabe also "strongly disagrees" with the suggestion that financial considerations are not the cause of Japan's shrinking population.
"Young people still want to marry, to have a family, to have more children, but when buying a car or a house is so hard because of economic concerns, it's very difficult to have children," he said.
Another obstacle to Ishida's vision of romance curing the nation's population problems is Japan's deeply conservative society.
"I think it is embarrassing to be romantic in a public place because other people will see you and some people don't like to see that," said Emi, a 20-year-old student from Yokohama, who preferred not to give her surname.
"We see people in other countries holding hands, hugging or kissing in public on films or on television, but I would be very uncomfortable if my boyfriend did that to me in public," she said.
Japan's declining population has been predicted for at least two decades, but has worsened far sooner than experts anticipated.
There were 125.7 million Japanese in 2021, down from a peak of 128 million in 2017, while a study in the medical journal The Lancet before the pandemic predicted the population would contract to 53 million by the end of the century.
While shocking, that figure now appears rather optimistic. According to government data, just 384,942 babies were born in the first half of 2022, down 5 per cent from the same period the previous year.
In 2017, the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research forecast that births would not fall below 800,000 a year until 2030, but that number is expected to fall below that threshold for the first time since figures were first collated in 1899.
Yet Watanabe said he is optimistic about Japan's younger generation, stating how resilient they have been based on all the global changes they've witnessed from the September 11 attacks to the financial crisis, as well as the 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan, to the current war in Ukraine.
"But they have come through, they are more flexible and optimistic in their outlooks, increasingly international, more liberal than their parents' generation and, most importantly, they are more resilient," he said. "And that leaves me optimistic."
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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