Taro Aso is getting down to business as the 92nd Prime Minister of Japan, forming his cabinet quickly after his landslide election. One of his first moves has been to appoint Yuko Obuchi, the 34-year-old daughter of the former Prime Minister who sadly died in office, as a new Special Minister in Charge of Measures Dealing with the Falling Birth Rate. Obuchi, who happens to hail from J-List’s home prefecture of Gunma, might be the perfect person to serve as poster child for the issue, since she’s got a lot of visibility as a young female lawmaker (following recent political trends, she’s quite the hottie), and she has a one-year old baby, too. The problem of shoshika, literally “fewer children-ization” or the increasing dearth of children in Japan, has got a lot of people worried as its effects start to be felt in earnest, and Japan’s population is projected to drop from 130 to 100 million by the middle of the century if things don’t improve. Already Japanese cities are being forced to close some elementary schools, tearing them down or re-purposing them for use as general municipal buildings. There are many reasons why Japanese women are waiting longer to start having children and are having fewer when they do, with everything from the high cost of raising a child to changing social roles to a general lack of patriotic spirit among Japanese suggested. Prime Minister Aso will likely face more debate on the issue if an election is called in the next few months, as is expected, and the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has been floating a plan to pay each household $250 per month for every child they have. Personally, I’d feel better about bringing children into a world where the government is solvent and not wasting its money in silly ideas, but that’s just me.
(This is a chart of the Japanese birth rate, going form 4.5 children per female in 1947 to 1.4 today. The dip you see in the middle is the year of Hinouema, the Year of the Fire Horse, 1966. According to superstition, girls born in this year are supposedly very headstrong, and parents avoid having children in this year to avoid having daughters that can’t find husbands.)
