O-bon; and a quick note on school costs

We've had our O-bon holidays and spent most of it doing nothing much. Went up the Rokko mountain in Kobe once for sightseeing and dinner (I'll post a few pictures later), and I've spent some time developing and scanning negatives and processing images. Since most places were open as usual on Wednesday and Thursday I also took the opportunity to do a bunch of bank errands and such. I can't really do that normally, what with me being at work on weekdays and no bank close to the university.

Silhouette. I've tried out Delta3200; this shot was exposed at 6400. As you can see there's lots and lots of grain here, but if anything I think it enhances the image.

Anyway, a mildly interesting, but rather short English-language overview of the costs of schooling in Japan in Mainichi yesterday. Takeaway message: school-related costs (not food or clothing or anything, but school) for one child from preschool up to university costs their parents an average of about 8.6 million yen ($90k USD or 660k SKR) for an all-public education, up to 22.5 million ($250k USD or 1.7 million SKR) for all-private schools. Schooling takes about 25% of annual income for high-income families, and over half for people with normal incomes (as a post-doc level researcher I would fall squarely in the normal-income bracket).

Note that the choice between public and private isn't completely free; especially at university level public schools tend to be hard to get into. Also note that these are averages. The article notes that studying science and mathematics is more expensive for students than arts and literature.

It is also worth noting that while individual people decide on a child for all kinds of idiosyncratic-seeming reasons, people are quite rational in aggregate. When the cost of child rearing increases and the benefit of children - as family farm workers, pension insurance and so on - decreases, people respond by having fewer children. The cost of child rearing has increased substantially in Japan; my resident expert informs me that school costs were nothing like this expensive a generation or two ago. The cost of children has increased elsewhere of course, simply because a university exam has gone from a fairly rare luxury almost to a prerequisite for a normal middle-class life. That means both the added cost of university, and another 3-5 years of adolescence (or 20 years and counting in my case).

At the same time, the economic benefits of children have decreased. Few people today have a family business where children are welcome helping hands (to say nothing of the legality of child work). They're still a semi-official part of the pension system in Japan, but that system is in long-term danger of collapse. Fewer pensioners actually have surviving children to take care of them any more. Many middle-aged children find they can't both spend part- or full time taking care of an ailing parent, bring up a child of their own and hold down a job at the same time. This is becoming a frequent theme in TV dramas as well as in real-life tragedies of murder-suicides committed by desperate people unable to cope with the burden.

Shizuoka

Shizuoka prefecture - along the coast between Tokyo and Osaka - isn't having a good week so far. Yesterday, at 5 in the morning, they had a shindo 6, magnitude 6.4 earthquake - strong enough that it woke us up in Osaka. Which was when a typhoon was passing by and drenching the area. It seems only one person died from the earthquake, while at least 13 people have died from the typhoon across the country and dozens more still missing. For all the fear of earthquakes, typhoons are actually both more common and more dangerous.

It lead to a slightly absurd scene on the morning news yesterday where the screen was overlaid with competing disaster information text scrollers and maps, all but covering the announcer. He was busy listing closed train lines and roads, and for some reason adding which disaster was responsible for each closure, as if that matters a whole lot to people unable to travel or even get to work.

This news managed to get top billing for only one day before being pushed back again by this week's real-life soap opera drama of Noriko Sakai - actress/talent with a wholesome Mommy's girl image - and her husband being arrested for drug possession. Apparently this "disaster" is more important to people than a typhoon; the typhoon can't cry and fake repentance on a live press conference, I guess.

Capital Comments.

I'm just back from a short trip to Sapporo; I'll write about it soon, but meanwhile, here's a helpful tip for those who like to post comments anywhere on the net:

When you CAPITALIZE random words to MAKE a POINT, you're NOT really PERSUADING ANYBODY. You JUST make it DIFFICULT to READ your post, and YOU make yourself LOOK like an IRATE CRANK. Please STOP DOING it.

World Press Photo - Reminder

The World Press Photo is a foundation in Netherlands running a yearly competition for press photographers. And every year the winners and finalists are displayed in an exhibition held around the world over the year. The Osaka exhibition is conveniently right around O-bon next week, from Tuesday the 11th to Thursday the 20th, in Herbis Hall, Umeda. We've gone there the last couple of years and we'll go there this year too. I really recommend you to go see it if you have the chance; check the link above for times and places around the world.

The Best Husbands in the World

In a true landmark study (covered by an English-language Swedish paper, Indian business newspaper, Japanese coverage) of impeccable methodology and breathtaking scope, Oxford economist Almudena Sevilla-Sanz has found that the best, most attractive husbands hail from... Sweden. Also near the top is Norway, North Ireland and Britain. At the bottom we find Japan, Germany, Austria and Australia.

As good as it gets, apparently. Oh the humanity...

Just by glancing at the top result it should be quite obvious to anyone that the study is correct; nevertheless, there may be a few fleeting doubts, so let's take a look at the paper itself. As it turns out, of course, the paper is not primarily about the desirability of men in different countries - trust the daily media to focus on that aspect - but really about how gender equality affects the rate of cohabitation and marriage as opposed to single households. Why is that important? The degree of cohabitation affects the birthrate, something countries like Japan and Italy - that battle low birthrates and have low gender equality - should be concerned with.

There's a lot of details - and details matter for this kind of modeling - but Dr. Sevilla-Sanz' idea in brief is that both women and men prefer partners that shoulder their share of the housework, child rearing and other responsibilities in the partnership.

In economic terms (she is an economist), the cost - in time and effort as well as money - of sharing a household increases for a woman when the man is not willing or able to pitch in and help. And when shared households become more expensive, women will become more choosy, and fewer women will live with a partner. On the other hand, of course, in a hypothetical society where men did more than their fair share they would be hesitant to make a household together. The optimal point is when the work is shared equally.

Of course, social norms make men and women shoulder different amounts of responsibility, which decreases the number of shared households. She shows that it is the availability of egalitarian men that is the limiting factor. This has the effect that in a given society, for men that want a partner it's better to be egalitarian, whereas for women it's better not to be. But it's better for both if the society as a whole has a more egalitarian attitude.

To test this model, she looked at an international survey on division of labour and social norms, selecting 13 countries. She compared the survey results with the proportion of people who are married or cohabiting. he finds that indeed, people are more likely to live together in more egalitarian countries and it does seem consistent with the explanation her model gives us. She looks at various other factors (such as age distribution, attitudes towards cohabitation and divorce and the education level of men and women - higher education generally means you're less likely to live with somebody) but she finds they can't explain this effect.

So, men from more egalitarian societies (like *cough* Sweden) are more desirable long-term partners than those from more unequal countries; likewise for women. And whereas more egalitarian men from a given country are more desirable, more egalitarian women are somewhat less so - though that effect is much weaker than the countrywide differences.

As she points out, the proportion of people that live with a partner really affects the countrywide birthrate. I argued in a post a couple of years ago that part reason for the birthrate deline in these societies was that the conservative norms in these countries no longer matched the reality of modern life, making marriage and child rearing too expensive (in a broad sense) for more and more people. Of course, I was pretty much talking out of my hat, like bloggers are wont to do, without any hard data or models to back me up. Dr. Sevilla-Sanz does have a model and data for part of this. As she puts it in the conclusion:

The study of below replacement fertility characteristic of industrialized countries has traditionally overlooked household formation processes. However, cross-country differences in household formation rates are significant. Both, declines in marriage rates and increases in cohabitation rates have followed very different trends across the developed world. In particular, the so-called lowest-low fertility countries, like Italy, Japan or Spain, have experienced a decline in marriage rates that have not been accompanied by increases in cohabitation (and out-of wedlock fertility) rates characteristic of other developed countries. It becomes thus increasingly important to look at household formation processes for the study of fertility.

Tsuyu is Over

Tsuyu, the rainy season, is finally over. The meteorological agency has declared it over in the Kinki region from yesterday, 15 days later than usual. And there was much rejoicing... I think.

We'd already guessed it'd be over about now. The air turned perceptively drier on Monday and the temperature climbed from around 30 last week to 35 degrees. According to the agency, we should expect a cooler August than usual; by "cooler" they of course mean "Still too damn hot to leave the comfort of an air conditioner if I can at all help it". It may not creep up to 40 this year, but peak daytime of 35 is still plenty enough thank you very much.

At least we'll be able to dry our umeboshi during Obon next week; we were starting to worry about that.

On Housing

Our Man in Abiko has a quick video up about housing in Japan (his videos are good fun, though I believe Ingmar Bergman can rest easy for a while yet). Mutantfrog has a companion piece with some statistics highlighted. One point Our Man makes is that buildings are badly built and near worthless when old. There's a reason for that.

Corner house in the neighborhood. It was torn down two years ago.

The climate and the geology here is hard on buildings, with typhoons, hot, humid weather, floods, landslides, earthquakes and so on. The climate and resources also dictate light wooden buildings rather than stone; the islands are volcanic, so there's a relative lack of hard stone good for building, and stone buildings are susceptible to earthquake damage.

And as buildings just weren't expected to last all that long anyway, there was little point in wasting effort and material to overdesign them. Make it last for a generation or two instead, and let people rebuild from time to time. Even temples and shrines sometimes schedule a periodic tear-down and rebuild of their halls.

A peculiarity of the throw-away mentality is that many houses have serious brick or tile facades only toward the street. Out the back they're completely plain, even unfinished-looking.

Today we can make buildings that last longer, but the idea that old houses - single-family homes especially - are near worthless lives on. The land is everything and the building on it is generally worth nothing at all unless near-new. In fact, old buildings may actually detract from the land price since the new owner will have to pay to tear it down.

And since you won't get your money back if you build to last, people usually don't. So you get family homes and apartments with badly insulated paper-thin walls and single-pane windows, no central heating, creaky floors, dingy fake wood paneling and cheap-looking facades. Buildings that naturally are nearly worthless after thirty years, further reinforcing the idea that old buildings are no good.

If a few far-sighted people started building for the long term, attitudes could change of course. But they'd be just one unfortunate landslide or earthquake away from looking less like visionaries and more like wasteful dunces.

Rowhouses in south Osaka. No new rowhouses are being built and the last pre-war houses are rapidly disappearing, so this will soon be another historical footnote.