|
From Japan’s baby
window to polyandry: how will Asia respond to low fertility?
“Hatch for
unwanted babies.”
It is a headline over
the kind of weird story that sometimes seems to be a Japanese
specialty. But it actually could mean a lot about the extraordinary
demographic changes taking place throughout the developed world –
in Asia even more than in Europe.
The “hatch”
in question has been opened at locations around Japan for women to
dispose anonymously of unwanted babies, no questions asked, to be
looked after and eventually adopted by someone who wants them. It
sounds like the very antithesis of Japanese tradition and has been
roundly condemned by politicians demanding a return to Japanese
family values.
But it makes a lot of
sense to the Catholic Church, which is behind the idea and sees it as
an alternative for some of the hundreds of thousands of Japanese
women who have abortions. The church is behind a similar scheme in
Germany, which also has a high ratio of abortions to births. The
church condemns abortion, which is so accessible in Japan that that
it exceeds the number of births annually.
It also makes sense to
at least some of those who worry about Japan’s very low
fertility rate. The population is just starting to fall and the
nation will face huge problems as the number of people in the
workforce will drop dramatically in the not-too-distant future. If
the present fertility rate continues, the Japanese population, now
128 million, will fall below 100 million by 2050, to 40 million in a
century. At this rate, the nation would be extinct by the end of the
22nd century.
Thus anything which
causes women to give birth rather than abort is regarded as welcome.
There are lots of
explanations as to why Japan’s fertility rate has fallen so
low. Now around 1.3, it has been below replacement level since the
mid 1970s. The reasons include inadequate government payments for
child support, lack of nursery schools, low levels of female
employment, long commutes and working hours for employees, cramped
living conditions, costly housing, and even falling sperm counts.
But if Japan has a
problem, what about the rest of East Asia? The lowest fertility rates
are found in Hong Kong (0.9) South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, all
below even the lowest in Europe. Singapore and Hong Kong may be small
enough to compensate by importing mainland Chinese and Southeast
Asians. But what is South Korea going to do? Its birthrate is also
below replacement, unless it can take over the North where (if you
can believe the statistics) the fertility rate is 2.1.
The mainland is not
much better at 1.7 – down from 5.8 in 1970. Even if the One
Child policy ends, rapid urbanization suggests that China’s
fertility rate will fall further. Rates in big cities like Shanghai
are already down to the Hong Kong level. Worse still, there is now a
10 percent surplus of boys at the young ages, suggesting a future of
either war, hoodlums, gay marriage or polyandry. Imagine -- today’s
Communist party chiefs with their multiple mistresses could be
replaced by sexually active females with male harems!
Asian countries
continue to delude themselves that their family values are superior
to the west and that will ensure the survival of families, marriage
and the tradition of family care of the older generation. The
evidence from Japan and now from Hong Kong and Singapore is that care
for parents is also a waning tradition.
East Asia faces even
bigger demographic problems than Europe, if only because the
transition from high to very low birth rates has been so sudden. Nor
is the issue confined to industrialized East Asia. Thailand’s
birth rate is also now below replacement levels and the percentage of
old people will start to rise rapidly within 20 years. Vietnam’s
change to low fertility came late but, like China’s, has been
very sudden.
So how are these
societies going to react? Are they condemned to rapid aging and
eventual falls in population? Or will some combination of natural
processes and official policy cause a reversal?
For clues they need to
look at what has happened in the west, once seen as individualistic
rather than family-oriented, In the US, the overall fertility rate is
close to replacement level, but only because of the high rates shown
by recently arrived groups, like Hispanics at 2.9. Longer-established
groups, whatever their ethnicity, have rates akin to European
averages.
But Europe itself shows
puzzling variations which can be hard to explain but give some clues.
The lowest rates are in Catholic southern Europe, once regarded as
church and family oriented. Meanwhile the highest rates are found in
northern Europe – Sweden, Norway, France, and the Netherlands.
These at 1.8-1.9 are now close to replacement levels.
They also have three
characteristics that are absent in much of east Asia.
-
High levels of
government support for children, generous maternal and paternal
leave, provision of nursery schools and crèches.
-
Very high levels
of female workforce participation – like Singapore and Hong
Kong but unlike Korea and Japan
-
A high level of
births outside wedlock – even though abortion is readily
available.
This all suggests that
most women still want babies provided they can make the decisions and
do not have to rely on men to do more than provide the seed.
Fertility is an
ever-varying and quite unpredictable factor in social evolution. But
whether it is baby hatches, unmarried mothers, new forms of extended
family, polyandry or euthanasia, demographic and economic change is
creating new and surprising developments in society. Do not be
shocked. Search for the reason.
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/Hide comments
Show/Hide comment form
The grim truth of war remains: hearts and minds are lost in the campaign to get the enemy by the balls
It's not a Japanese problem.
If you live a working class life in an over-crowded capitalist country, you find it isn't worth the sacrifice to the patriarchs or the nationalists to have kids.
And the longer a population waits to have kids, the fewer kids it's ultimately going to have.