Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on November 2011

Based on current population figures, it has been estimated that by the year 3000 there will be only 18 Japanese people alive.

A low birthrate, the costs of an aging population and the end of the flourishing postwar economic state are expected to drive Japan’s population to near extinction. Due to current demographic changes and the expectation that little will change over the following years, demographers and sociologists, economists and political scientists are devoting scholastic energy to population studies in Japan.

The term shoshika generally refers to the modern decline in birthrate. First used in Japanese government documents in 1992, shoshika has a twofold definition encompassing “the lowering of birthrate and the accompanying decline in child numbers in the family and society.”

Driven by an often poignant nationalism, lawmakers have taken up the “problem” of the birthrate, passing legislation to provide additional financial and social welfare support for childrearing men and women. The stance a politician takes for or against these policies continues to be an integral part of his or her campaign. Corporations have been encouraged to change leave policies to accommodate childrearing families. Individuals are reminded yearly of the newest total fertility rate while the media follows its fluctuations from year to year.

The total fertility rate (TFR)—the hypothetical average number of children born to a woman during her lifetime were current trends to continue—has been calculated since 1947, and has dropped ever since its peak (4.32) in 1949. Last year’s rate was 1.39. Though intended to be a neutral indicator, there are numerous problems with the statistic. On the one hand, it is often presented as the simple average number of children born to a woman. On the other, it is seen as placing the blame for reproductive negligence on women. Despite these and other objections, TFR is the statistic most widely used in studies of shoshika.

As the birthrate drops and families become more thoroughly nuclear, highly influential scholars have begun to craft correlations between shoshika and a changing Japanese family. Media and political rhetoric often characterizes the malaise of these modern, nuclear families as overwhelmingly urban, isolated and individualistic (also termed selfish). Women are career-minded, and refuse to marry or bear more than the two-child norm. Men are absent and children grow up abused, alone and selfish. This is contrasted with the nostalgic myth of the “traditional” Japanese family: that it was a large, self-supporting corporation that formed the basis for cooperative village and town life. Children were raised by grandparents, scolded by neighbors and surrounded by siblings plentiful enough to make sports teams.

This is not the only “traditional” family seen in Japanese history. In fact, the present family mimics the family found in the histories of Edo, a long period marked by stable, relatively low fertility rates and households composed of non-kin adults and their few children. Early forms of birth control were practiced, taboos were acted to prevent childbearing both early and late in women’s reproductive lives and systems of adoption allowed childless couples to make up for infertility by taking in the children of others. As Japan progressed toward modernization through the Meiji, Taisho and Showa periods, a nationalistic, rigorous rhetoric appeared, aimed at encouraging higher reproduction. National policies were enacted to promote larger families and a lower marrying age—often at the expense of women’s health and family welfare.

The debate about shoshika ignores the Edo period of small families in its criticism of today’s trends. Current demographic and family changes—often presented as drastic and dangerous drops in birthrate—are the natural outcome of overactive reproduction in the years preceding and directly following the Pacific War.

Having spent years interacting with single and married Japanese and their children, I have explored the dynamics of birth choice. The family is just as free from—and fraught with—the complications of balancing family values, economic pressures and individual pleasures as the people of any country. Despite some rhetoric to the contrary, nothing in particular marks the Japanese parent as having a higher tendency to child abuse, less love for children or concern for the success of industry, education and government welfare systems than that of any other set of persons in the industrialized world.

In suggesting the imminent threat that change may bring to Japan, shoshika has become more of a political game than an actual and valid phenomenon. Creating a problem outside of the limiting bounds of historical and cultural perspective not only hurts Japan’s image abroad, it also hurts those closer to home. Suggesting that the Japanese family is headed for ruin—or the population to extinction—is unfounded.

Leaving decisions about its form and welfare up to the family, and letting women and men decide if and when to have children, will be the only way to ensure that Japan will positively encounter opportunities to consider the quality of family life while responding to the complex issues raised by economic changes. It is well-supported families that are the key to ending the “problem” of shoshika.

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