Japan is Suffering from Rapid Aging Population and Low Fertility Rate

How can the foreign workforce revolutionise the deep-seated Japanese Culture?

I love Japan. But as a social anthropologist, I’m not satisfied just to visit there as a tourist. I want to really know Japan.

Growing up watching Japanese TV drama programmes, it becomes apparent to me that this is a nation with a history of miraculous post-war growth but also a number of underlying issues.

Being Chinese, I know that any rapid economic growth comes with a cost, usually to the society, to the people working hard every day on the ground.

This is the case for Japan, with a rapidly ageing population and extremely low fertility rate. There aren’t enough new blood to replace the retiring population, and the retired population is getting very old and starts to need help from the Government.

A healthy, successful country should have enough funds and sustainability to support the needs of the older population, who has contributed to the GDP massively throughout their years of working. But as the book, 100-year-life has confirmed that, as we are living for longer, the study-work-retire model might no longer work, not only in Japan but all over the world.

I have just finished this series of lectures given by sociologist Sawako Shirahase from the University of Tokyo on “Contemporary Japanese Society: What Has Been Happening Behind Demographic Change”. You can study for free here.

But specifically for Japan, a place where I dream to go, does it open a door for immigrants and foreigners? Will Japan fully transform into a globalised metropolitan city, or at risk of extinction?

Why economic growth stopped people from making babies in Japan?

To understand the issues specific to Japan, it’s important to understand how the society has been structured in the Land of the Rising Sun.

What foreigners already know about Japan is that they are hard-working and take things very seriously. Japanese has a strong affiliation with the country, their organisations and families. It was exactly this loyalty that contributed to the success of the nation, especially in the 20th century, to become the first industrialised nation in Asia.

When someone’s working for the nation and the corporations, there has to be someone at home, for the family. Naturally, Japan has maintained a very structural division of labour — men earn the cash, women keep the home.

Unfortunately because of that, half of the workforce has brought up to expect to stay at home as soon as they get married — that’s the ladies. When women became a crucial workforce in the rest of the world, taking important and senior roles, the main role of women in Japan are still to find a husband, give birth and stay home.

Not everyone wanted that, women in Japan started to question the pressure to get married and make families, and their own career ambitions. It is frustrating, however, that the gender pay gap remains high (ranking 110 of 149 countries in 2020) as society has not reacted to the fact that women should have a career too.

So Japan is literally in a transition where more women want to work, and fewer women want to give birth. This reduces the fertility rate tremendously and contributes to the skewed population spread.

What are the men doing?

As and when women trying to break through the societal norms, the men aren’t happy with the outlook of their lives neither.

According to Prof. Shirahase, against the rational data and statistics, many men have thought their life outlook has become worse than their fathers.

This is understandable because Japan has gone through a shocking post-war growth and slowed down after 1973. Plus the global economic crisis in 2008, it’s not surprising that they don’t feel as great as their parents.

Hong Kong, where I’m from, has also gone through a similar experience. The city became an international finance hub in the 1980s, and rich people were everywhere. However, for all sorts of external and internal reasons, including the extreme property prices, where an average home costs 45.19 times more than a person’s mean salary (for comparison, London is 15.65 times, and Tokyo is 15.4 times).

As the traditional family structure focuses on men being the breadwinner in Japan, they probably don’t feel like bearing the responsibility as a father/husband when things don’t seem to be doing too well. So they are also not getting married and having babies.

Plus, if their parents remain alive for long and are asking for help, they probably can’t afford to take care of both the elderly and the young. I can totally sympathise with the lack of incentive to become the head of a household.

Time for the foreigners to spark joy in Japan

I enjoyed Prof. Shirahase’s lecture a lot because she’s addressing stats with cultural characteristics. We can’t generalise economic theories in one country because the performance and patterns are always tied to the culture.

Japan’s culture is very distinct and largely uninfluenced by the outside because of the language barrier and cultural segregation they have imposed on outsiders. Apart from the smart move to open the country to the US in 1853 that led to industrialisation, Japan has always been a close country, partly due to it being an island (saying that China was very close too, despite not being an island).

Japanese’s population replacement rate has turned negative (i.e. not enough new blood to replace the retiring workforce) since the 1970s. The Japanese government only accepted that in the 1990s (!), the fertility rate continues to fall, and the gap is getting larger.

We can’t force the old people to work, or the young people to make babies (except for this Japanese city official who encouraged their new workers to mingle with the opposite sex — the funniest news I have ever read).

So the third strand of the demographic structure has to be utilised and that’s international migration.

Prof. Shirawase hasn’t talked about this area much in her lectures. But in recent years, the visa application to go to Japan has become a lot easier, which is a good thing. I am not going into the details of getting a visa, but on the cultural side, why in the midst of risks and challenges, there’s a win-win opportunity for Japan to welcome more foreigners.

What foreigners can bring to Japanese society

The winning factors for foreigners are of course job opportunities and enjoying a fascinating country with epic infrastructure like Japan.

From the Japanese side, there are the obvious needs to fill in the gaps in jobs, maintain GDP output and help with the country’s growth as the government fixes the issue with low fertility rate and social stratification.

As Prof. Shirawase analysed, the issues the Japanese are facing is very unique to the country. In the sense that it is rooted in how they structure family and gender roles. These deep-seated cultural traits are hard to shake from the inside, especially with around 27% of the population aged 65 and above with traditional beliefs.

Cultural changes are most likely going to be changed from the outside.

Foreign female entrepreneurs recognising the talent of the female workforce, foreign workers who demand work-life balance and better benefits to fathers and mothers, foreign fathers who actually dare to take paternity leave (yes, Japan offers a whopping 30 weeks of paid paternity leave, but apparently no one takes it, fearing the security of their jobs and reputation).

As foreign talents demand benefits that are pretty common abroad, the cultural change will take place consciously or unconsciously. Whilst some locals might question the negative impact, but it’s time to remind them that Japan isn’t the most productive country, the countries that have great benefits are people actually take holidays, are.

I love Japan, I love it enough to wake up at 6 am every day to study 2 hours of Japanese on my own in order to move there. I live in Brighton and has a good job, so there aren’t many push factors from my side (maybe apart from the food, LOL). It’s the pull factors from Japan that attract me there.

As Japan making structural changes to combat the various domestic challenges, it will attract workers with all different levels and sets of skills. The highly-skilled (which Japan has a specific visa to hire them) will demand benefits on par with what they can receive abroad, and in order to keep these talents, Japan will need to adapt.

It’s really not a bad thing if more Japanese can speak fluent English (or other languages), or if early childcare is better supported so women can continue to work after giving birth. It has proved to work in most countries, and if anything, I believe Japan will become the model country, telling the world how do we sort out the problem of ageing, low fertility and workforce’s health.

Hi, this is Priscilla (プリシラ), a social entrepreneur passionate about the ageing population, alternative living arrangements and relieving people from loneliness. I am writing everything I’m learning about Japan (including Japanese language study experience, urgh!) here on Medium.

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