So, the DPJ actually made it (I'm a perennial pessimist regarding that party). They seem to be fairly well prepared for a power handover, so we should expect to see them get to work relatively quickly, assembling a government by mid September. How much actual change will we see? for this first year, expect only easy, highly visible, symbolic changes. The reason, of course, being the upcoming upper house election - yes, we're doing a repeat performance of the hit political show of the year next summer - and the DPJ will need to show some kind of visible progress to the voters by then. Anything very complex or time consuming may well be started but probably not pushed until after that election. Also, any issues where the DPJ is at odds with coalition partners SDPJ and the PNP will wait until after the election, when their support might no longer be necessary.
As for the fundamental questions faced by the Japanese society - things like the gulf between salaried and temp workers; the low birthrate; the rampant inequality and paternalistic social systems; the underutilization of women in the workplace - the truth is that the DPJ really is in no better position to address them than the LDP was. It is a broadly conservative party when it comes to social issues and a substantial part of the party is aghast at the thought of changing tradition-bound systems even in the face of a slowly unfolding disaster. A number of other high-profile problems, such as social security systems that no longer fit the way people live their lives, are tangentially connected to these issues and thus unlikely to see more than temporary band-aids.
For instance, many laws and regulations assume and actively promote the 20-century family unit (actually a fairly recent family type, even though many conservatives seem to believe it's traditional) of one married breadwinner, one stay-at-home parent and their children. This life is proving to be impossible to achieve for many young people, since temp jobs are not stable or high-paying enough to marry and support a family, while two working parents are very discouraged by lack of day care, rules permitting (even expecting) workplaces to fire women once they get children and other disincentives. But changing rules so that two working parents are encouraged, making it easier to be a single parent, and making it easier for women to continue a career while having children, is anathema to many conservatives and seen as a path to moral dissolution and the destruction of society.
You can certainly argue that in this they are simply following the overall attitude of the country as a whole - and Japan is indeed very conservative with regard to some social issues. But in times of crisis a leader is expected to actually lead and drive opinion rather than follow it. I don't see the DPJ do more than baby steps in this direction, just to mollify its SDPJ partner, and I'm not optimistic that the DPJ would even be able to do much more without creating a serious, potential fatal rift within the party in the process.
The DPJ win is good, it is necessary, and it will hopefully cause some long overdue change in the governance of the country. But don't expect any actual long-term solutions to Japan's current ills from this government. The crisis will have to become rather more acute for anything to happen, no matter which government is in power.
Showing posts with label population. Show all posts
Showing posts with label population. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Monday, August 24, 2009
Dwindling Regions
The always interesting Jun Okumura at Globaltalk 21 has an interesting post about the (mis)use of "urban" and "rural" as terms for a very different dichotomy, between densely populated growth areas with much of the political, cultural and economic power on one hand; and stagnating regions on the other. I'm not going to wade into the terminology issue here, since I have no solution to that. Just try give a good term for places like Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and perhaps Sapporo on one hand; and Aomori, Miyazaki or the infamous Yubari on the other, and do so without building their differing economic and population trends into the definition. It's not so easy.
Anyway, Okumura asks towards the end what, if anything, can reverse the trend in many regions of stagnation and population decline. I suspect that for some places at least there is no stopping the decline. A flawed but quick assessment of a community would be to ask "If there was no village, town or city here today already, would anybody come here and create it?" Places don't spring into existence without reason, and in the long run they don't continue to exist if their reasons to do so are gone.
Perhaps one of the best, most drastic examples in Japan is Hashima island (also called "Gunkajima" - Battleship island - due to its silhouette on the sea). It was a thriving island city built around a productive coal mine. But once the mine was closed in the 1970's, it was quickly abandoned. There was simply no reason left to stay any longer. Today Gunkajima is an amazing place - a densely urban area left to naturally fall apart without human intervention. If you want to know what a modern industrialized city will look like when abandoned, all you have to do is take a look at some of the excellent photography from the place. Annoyingly there is not much high-quality footage posted online; Yuji Saiga has some stunning images, but marred by huge, annoying watermarks that make them almost unwatchable. A search through Google Images gives you another taste. The island is off limits to casual visitors (it's pretty dangerous), but there are occasional tours to small parts of it.
It's sad to say, but a fair number of places in Japan (and elsewhere) is undergoing the exact same process as Hashima island, but over the span of decades and centuries rather than months and years. Most settlements begin for some specific reason: it's a natural harbour; site of a mine, forest or other natural resource; or a river or train transport hub, perhaps. Or they're a company town, with one or two major employers driving the economy. But few reasons remain indefinitely. Mines become depleted, companies move or go bankrupt, transport shifts from rivers to train to roads (and upstream sources of goods may dwindle). Forestry, fishing and farming may be more stable, but they've seen amazing increases in productivity and efficiency. You need far fewer people to work in those fields (sic) than you did a generation or two back; there may simply not be enough farm or forestry workers left in an area to sustain the community that once grew around them.
If a community has reasons to exist independent of the original ones they may be fine. But if they haven't been able to diversify (such as the famous former mining town of Yubari), there just might not be a way to save the place. It's not that people move out - they do, but people move out of all places all the time. It's that without a reason for the town there is no reason for people to move back in any more. That leaves you a population that is dwindling, ageing and becoming less well trained and educated on average over time. that of course just accelerates the pace of change and makes it more difficult to reverse.
Some regional areas will be just fine. But some will not, and in the end there is no policy that will be able to prevent it. The best course in those cases may be to alleviate the hardship for the people affected and make the transition as painless as possible.
Anyway, Okumura asks towards the end what, if anything, can reverse the trend in many regions of stagnation and population decline. I suspect that for some places at least there is no stopping the decline. A flawed but quick assessment of a community would be to ask "If there was no village, town or city here today already, would anybody come here and create it?" Places don't spring into existence without reason, and in the long run they don't continue to exist if their reasons to do so are gone.
Perhaps one of the best, most drastic examples in Japan is Hashima island (also called "Gunkajima" - Battleship island - due to its silhouette on the sea). It was a thriving island city built around a productive coal mine. But once the mine was closed in the 1970's, it was quickly abandoned. There was simply no reason left to stay any longer. Today Gunkajima is an amazing place - a densely urban area left to naturally fall apart without human intervention. If you want to know what a modern industrialized city will look like when abandoned, all you have to do is take a look at some of the excellent photography from the place. Annoyingly there is not much high-quality footage posted online; Yuji Saiga has some stunning images, but marred by huge, annoying watermarks that make them almost unwatchable. A search through Google Images gives you another taste. The island is off limits to casual visitors (it's pretty dangerous), but there are occasional tours to small parts of it.
It's sad to say, but a fair number of places in Japan (and elsewhere) is undergoing the exact same process as Hashima island, but over the span of decades and centuries rather than months and years. Most settlements begin for some specific reason: it's a natural harbour; site of a mine, forest or other natural resource; or a river or train transport hub, perhaps. Or they're a company town, with one or two major employers driving the economy. But few reasons remain indefinitely. Mines become depleted, companies move or go bankrupt, transport shifts from rivers to train to roads (and upstream sources of goods may dwindle). Forestry, fishing and farming may be more stable, but they've seen amazing increases in productivity and efficiency. You need far fewer people to work in those fields (sic) than you did a generation or two back; there may simply not be enough farm or forestry workers left in an area to sustain the community that once grew around them.
If a community has reasons to exist independent of the original ones they may be fine. But if they haven't been able to diversify (such as the famous former mining town of Yubari), there just might not be a way to save the place. It's not that people move out - they do, but people move out of all places all the time. It's that without a reason for the town there is no reason for people to move back in any more. That leaves you a population that is dwindling, ageing and becoming less well trained and educated on average over time. that of course just accelerates the pace of change and makes it more difficult to reverse.
Some regional areas will be just fine. But some will not, and in the end there is no policy that will be able to prevent it. The best course in those cases may be to alleviate the hardship for the people affected and make the transition as painless as possible.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
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:
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.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Hostility Killing Rural Japan?
There's an article in Japan Times making the argument that aversion to strangers - foreigners or Japanese - is killing rural Japan. Briefly, the argument is that as small rural or regional communities do not accept or welcome outside people that move in, it greatly discourages people from doing so. As a result, people elect to move to the cities instead (where everyone is a stranger) and the countryside suffers.
On one level the author is right. The insularity and inward-looking conservatism of rural communities is indeed one reason people choose not to move in - and why young rural people elect to live and work in culturally and socially open cities instead. the overall premise is wrong, however.
First, this is not in any way, shape or form a Japanese phenomenon. Rural, small communities everywhere are insular and indifferent, even hostile, to strangers. If I would move to a village in central Sweden I would not be accepted as one of them, ever. Sure, people may be friendly, but I would not be a villager, I'd be an outsider for the rest of my life. Try to move into small communities in France, or Eastern Europe, or America - it's all the same, with only the surface attitude differing from place to place.
And it's not this hostility per se that is killing rural Japan either; it may slightly hasten the trend but it's not causing it. As I've argued before, Japan is considerably more rural than other, comparable industrial economies, and the shift to a mostly urban economy is still ongoing. Economic and social opportunities have shifted towards urban life today, and the countryside would decline whether villagers were friendly to outsiders or not. I expect the Japanese rural population to further decline by almost half, simply to bring Japan in line with the average of other industrialized economies.
Communities being friendly or hostile may affect the future of those particular communities. But it will only help decide where rural people will still live in the future, not how many rural inhabitants the country will have overall.
On one level the author is right. The insularity and inward-looking conservatism of rural communities is indeed one reason people choose not to move in - and why young rural people elect to live and work in culturally and socially open cities instead. the overall premise is wrong, however.
First, this is not in any way, shape or form a Japanese phenomenon. Rural, small communities everywhere are insular and indifferent, even hostile, to strangers. If I would move to a village in central Sweden I would not be accepted as one of them, ever. Sure, people may be friendly, but I would not be a villager, I'd be an outsider for the rest of my life. Try to move into small communities in France, or Eastern Europe, or America - it's all the same, with only the surface attitude differing from place to place.
And it's not this hostility per se that is killing rural Japan either; it may slightly hasten the trend but it's not causing it. As I've argued before, Japan is considerably more rural than other, comparable industrial economies, and the shift to a mostly urban economy is still ongoing. Economic and social opportunities have shifted towards urban life today, and the countryside would decline whether villagers were friendly to outsiders or not. I expect the Japanese rural population to further decline by almost half, simply to bring Japan in line with the average of other industrialized economies.
Communities being friendly or hostile may affect the future of those particular communities. But it will only help decide where rural people will still live in the future, not how many rural inhabitants the country will have overall.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Immigration according to MTC
MTC over at Shisaku has a dense, significant, yet pleasantly short post about the reality of work immigration in Japan. No real comment about it from me so far; it offers a cornucopia of possible discussion threads and deserves a far more considered response than I currently can manage. Go check it out.
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Population Decline
It's been all over the news lately that Japan's population is now stagnant and expected to shrink over the next generation or so. The immediate reason is a low birth rate - the fertility rate has hovered at around 1.3 since 2000 - rather than high death rate or significant emigration. And the reasons for the low fertility rate are grounded in the disconnect between the traditional norms of official society on one hand, and the realities of modern life for people - and especially women - on the other.
As far as child rearing, the society is organized around the idea of the mother working at or close to home, with nearby or live-in grandparents as extra support. Meanwhile the father works farther afield (literally for farmers, and career workplace for others), earning most of the needed funds for supporting the family. Children cost a lot of resources of course, but were the main "retirement benefit"; they'd be taking you in and supporting you in your old age. And as an aside, this supposed family structure forms the basis for the career "salaryman" as well; the punishing office hours presume a stay-at-home wife to provide constant ground service and support.
But society doesn't look like this anymore. On one hand, the kind of stable solid-income employment needed for a single person to support a family is becoming rarer; all the increase in employment figures here has been in temporary positions and part-time work, while the famed "lifetime employment" positions have been declining. The new kind of jobs do not pay as well, and are nowhere as secure as real full-time work. So having two incomes is becoming more important for more families.
On the other hand the work opportunities for women have steadily improved, and young women especially expect to be able to have a career and an independent income. And more young people are embracing the uncertainties of the temp workplace over long-term employment in a conservative company with excruciatingly long hours and perhaps weeks without seeing their families.
But those career opportunities and flexibility is not supported by a society that still views the traditional setup as the norm. Child care - if available at all - is very expensive, and there is very little in the way of child care leave, sick leave for children, or indeed a right to keep your job once you marry or have children.
Also, single households are becoming more and more common. The reasons vary but are a combination of more people studying at university; lack of funds to move away from parents household and together with somebody; or just an unwillingness to throw away the freedoms of single life to comply with the strict societal demands accompanying cohabitation or marriage. And while being a single parent is a daunting task anywhere, it is all but impossible in Japan.
The attitude from governmental Japan so far ranges from denial to outright hostility towards the idea of any kind of nontraditional family circumstances. A year or so ago, the minister of health referred to women as "birth giving machines" and paternity laws still refuse to accept DNA testing as definitive since, in the view of conservatives, it would undermine public morals (How? Beats me). For children born within 300 days after a divorce they can end up in a no-mans-land where they are not recognized as full citizens and cannot get passports or other essential services.
The end result is that people are choosing to have fewer children; or they have their children later (which of course leads to declining population as well); or may in some cases decide against having children altogether.
Japan is not alone in this trend. Italy is grappling with low birthrate for very similar reasons - a conservative societal structure out of step with the more open, changing and economically uncertain reality. Societies that are not grappling with this have either gone through this stage in one way or another (my native Sweden would be one example, but many current first-world countries would qualify) or have yet to encounter this dissociation (again, any number of societies would qualify).
A lower population is by itself no danger to Japan in general or to rural Japan in particular. Population predictions (see this article for a summary and really good links) for 2050 puts the population at somewhere between 90-110 million people versus about 127 million today. But as recently as 1960, the total population of Japan stood at less than 95 million (lots of stats here). For most of Japans history, including much of the past century, it has had a substantially smaller population than today - and managed a thriving economy and lively countryside just fine. How low a population could you have? Sweden is about the same size as Japan - around 20% larger, in fact - and has about 9 million inhabitants. It manages to have a thriving high-value export economy and standard of living right up at the top along with Japan.
Economically, fewer people means less economic output. But as far as living standards go, this is irrelevant; it's economic output per person that matters. And of course with a smaller population you have fewer people to share the economic wealth, as Scandinavian countries give example of. Yes, it will mean that Japans economic clout out in the world shrinks, but that is not really a societal problem. Most countries have no problem not being among the top ten economies of the world, and the public - unlike status-seeking politicians - can probably take that loss of status with equanimity.
While having fewer people than the present is not a problem, having the population change rapidly is. Whether population grows or shrinks, any society will have to struggle with keeping up. Crowded schools and insufficient number of teachers during child boom years; empty schools and redundant teachers now. Population changes are slow, but so are understandably large-scale infrastructure changes. And just like managing population growth is all about slowing it enough for the society to keep up, so is managing a decline. As long as the change is slow enough for services and planning to keep up, things will be fine. If not, you'll face growing or shrinking pains until it does.
Along with the population decline comes an aging population. And this can be serious if not handled correctly. Much of the reason for it is due to people living longer, though, not just the decline of young people, and it is a general problem Japan shares with many other countries (Sweden included). In a way it's a good problem to have - it means people are living a lot longer after all. There's two problems with an older population, both related to retirement. The first is that Japan - like a number of countries, but unlike Sweden - still has a pension system where the current workers pay for the current retirees. It's a pyramid scheme that depends on having a steadily increasing pool of new payers coming in at the bottom. That system was usually set up at a time when you had perhaps three or four working people for each retiree, and it breaks down when the proportion is closer to 1.5 workers per retiree as is now the case.
In the case of Sweden (I'm from Sweden; it's the country I know well, bear with me) we used to have a similar system, but a fairly severe financial crisis in the 90's gave the impetus needed to reform it into a system where each retiree is paying for themselves. Your retirement is thus not fixed but what you receive depends on how much money you've paid in and how well the economy (and thus the pension investments) have grown during the years. The connection to the long-term economy is thus made clear, and you aren't nearly as dependent on demographics as in the old system. That kind of change again needs a crisis to effectuate though, and there hasn't been a sufficient one here yet.
The second issue is the pension age itself. In short, 60 is the new 40. The pension age in most systems (about 60-65 in almost all countries) was selected early last century, at a time when 65 was old, and most work was literally back-breaking. Those people who even managed to reach retirement age were generally worn down, in poor health and could normally not expect all that many years of retirement. Today is very different. Your average life expectancy is up into the late seventies (and is of course even higher for the cohorts actually reaching retirement age). Many people in professions that allow you to retire at will, like physicians, researchers and artisans choose to work far up into the 70's and it's becoming more and more common for retirees to launch "second careers" to capitalize on their knowledge or to do something related to their interests.
The problem is not that people are getting older, but that people aren't working longer as they do. I've seen a figure of 69 years as a retirement age as the cutoff for basically solving the retirement crisis in Japan. That might just shuffle the problem ahead another generation, though, as people continue to get older. Perhaps connect the retirement age to cohort life expectancy would be more prudent - and fairer too.
But this is all "easy" problems; easy in the sense that the proximate causes are known, as are the solutions - you even have a good sampling of other societies you can study to find out the anticipated effect of various approaches. The only thing lacking (severely lacking, in the case of the LDP) is political will to actually implement solutions they see as distasteful and socially and morally bankrupt; and yes, to LDP hardliners women with a career qualifies as distasteful - to a fair number of them, female suffrage undoubtedly does. I expect political Japan to come around eventually but it probably needs a political crisis moment of some sort, and a gradual decline doesn't offer one naturally. Having the LDP lose the lower house to DPJ at some point would qualify, I think, or an internal LDP scandal or even party split between the mainline conservatives and the far right.
So what of the decline of rural Japan? The population of Japan peaked last year; up until a year or two ago it was still slowly increasing. By contrast, the countryside depopulation has been going on for well over twenty years now, and perhaps longer. The countryside was more vibrant and alive in 1960 (with, as we saw, a far smaller countrywide population) than today. The rural depopulation has been progressing even as the total population has still been increasing. Population growth is thus not a major factor; it will tend to affect the rate of change, of course, but does not actually determine the fate of the countryside.
Population size change is not a driving factor, but what about the aging of Japan? After all, rural areas have not lost people equally. As communities shrink it is disproportionally the young that leave and the old that stay, making the countryside not just smaller but grayer as well. With fewer young people you get fewer children and with more old people you get higher health and retirement costs with fewer workers. It becomes an exaggerated over-the-top version of Japanese population change, with every problem blown up to caricature size. But the reason for that is not population size, but population movement and specifically urbanization, the subject of the next post.
As far as child rearing, the society is organized around the idea of the mother working at or close to home, with nearby or live-in grandparents as extra support. Meanwhile the father works farther afield (literally for farmers, and career workplace for others), earning most of the needed funds for supporting the family. Children cost a lot of resources of course, but were the main "retirement benefit"; they'd be taking you in and supporting you in your old age. And as an aside, this supposed family structure forms the basis for the career "salaryman" as well; the punishing office hours presume a stay-at-home wife to provide constant ground service and support.
But society doesn't look like this anymore. On one hand, the kind of stable solid-income employment needed for a single person to support a family is becoming rarer; all the increase in employment figures here has been in temporary positions and part-time work, while the famed "lifetime employment" positions have been declining. The new kind of jobs do not pay as well, and are nowhere as secure as real full-time work. So having two incomes is becoming more important for more families.
On the other hand the work opportunities for women have steadily improved, and young women especially expect to be able to have a career and an independent income. And more young people are embracing the uncertainties of the temp workplace over long-term employment in a conservative company with excruciatingly long hours and perhaps weeks without seeing their families.
But those career opportunities and flexibility is not supported by a society that still views the traditional setup as the norm. Child care - if available at all - is very expensive, and there is very little in the way of child care leave, sick leave for children, or indeed a right to keep your job once you marry or have children.
Also, single households are becoming more and more common. The reasons vary but are a combination of more people studying at university; lack of funds to move away from parents household and together with somebody; or just an unwillingness to throw away the freedoms of single life to comply with the strict societal demands accompanying cohabitation or marriage. And while being a single parent is a daunting task anywhere, it is all but impossible in Japan.
The attitude from governmental Japan so far ranges from denial to outright hostility towards the idea of any kind of nontraditional family circumstances. A year or so ago, the minister of health referred to women as "birth giving machines" and paternity laws still refuse to accept DNA testing as definitive since, in the view of conservatives, it would undermine public morals (How? Beats me). For children born within 300 days after a divorce they can end up in a no-mans-land where they are not recognized as full citizens and cannot get passports or other essential services.
The end result is that people are choosing to have fewer children; or they have their children later (which of course leads to declining population as well); or may in some cases decide against having children altogether.
Japan is not alone in this trend. Italy is grappling with low birthrate for very similar reasons - a conservative societal structure out of step with the more open, changing and economically uncertain reality. Societies that are not grappling with this have either gone through this stage in one way or another (my native Sweden would be one example, but many current first-world countries would qualify) or have yet to encounter this dissociation (again, any number of societies would qualify).
A lower population is by itself no danger to Japan in general or to rural Japan in particular. Population predictions (see this article for a summary and really good links) for 2050 puts the population at somewhere between 90-110 million people versus about 127 million today. But as recently as 1960, the total population of Japan stood at less than 95 million (lots of stats here). For most of Japans history, including much of the past century, it has had a substantially smaller population than today - and managed a thriving economy and lively countryside just fine. How low a population could you have? Sweden is about the same size as Japan - around 20% larger, in fact - and has about 9 million inhabitants. It manages to have a thriving high-value export economy and standard of living right up at the top along with Japan.
Economically, fewer people means less economic output. But as far as living standards go, this is irrelevant; it's economic output per person that matters. And of course with a smaller population you have fewer people to share the economic wealth, as Scandinavian countries give example of. Yes, it will mean that Japans economic clout out in the world shrinks, but that is not really a societal problem. Most countries have no problem not being among the top ten economies of the world, and the public - unlike status-seeking politicians - can probably take that loss of status with equanimity.
While having fewer people than the present is not a problem, having the population change rapidly is. Whether population grows or shrinks, any society will have to struggle with keeping up. Crowded schools and insufficient number of teachers during child boom years; empty schools and redundant teachers now. Population changes are slow, but so are understandably large-scale infrastructure changes. And just like managing population growth is all about slowing it enough for the society to keep up, so is managing a decline. As long as the change is slow enough for services and planning to keep up, things will be fine. If not, you'll face growing or shrinking pains until it does.
Along with the population decline comes an aging population. And this can be serious if not handled correctly. Much of the reason for it is due to people living longer, though, not just the decline of young people, and it is a general problem Japan shares with many other countries (Sweden included). In a way it's a good problem to have - it means people are living a lot longer after all. There's two problems with an older population, both related to retirement. The first is that Japan - like a number of countries, but unlike Sweden - still has a pension system where the current workers pay for the current retirees. It's a pyramid scheme that depends on having a steadily increasing pool of new payers coming in at the bottom. That system was usually set up at a time when you had perhaps three or four working people for each retiree, and it breaks down when the proportion is closer to 1.5 workers per retiree as is now the case.
In the case of Sweden (I'm from Sweden; it's the country I know well, bear with me) we used to have a similar system, but a fairly severe financial crisis in the 90's gave the impetus needed to reform it into a system where each retiree is paying for themselves. Your retirement is thus not fixed but what you receive depends on how much money you've paid in and how well the economy (and thus the pension investments) have grown during the years. The connection to the long-term economy is thus made clear, and you aren't nearly as dependent on demographics as in the old system. That kind of change again needs a crisis to effectuate though, and there hasn't been a sufficient one here yet.
The second issue is the pension age itself. In short, 60 is the new 40. The pension age in most systems (about 60-65 in almost all countries) was selected early last century, at a time when 65 was old, and most work was literally back-breaking. Those people who even managed to reach retirement age were generally worn down, in poor health and could normally not expect all that many years of retirement. Today is very different. Your average life expectancy is up into the late seventies (and is of course even higher for the cohorts actually reaching retirement age). Many people in professions that allow you to retire at will, like physicians, researchers and artisans choose to work far up into the 70's and it's becoming more and more common for retirees to launch "second careers" to capitalize on their knowledge or to do something related to their interests.
The problem is not that people are getting older, but that people aren't working longer as they do. I've seen a figure of 69 years as a retirement age as the cutoff for basically solving the retirement crisis in Japan. That might just shuffle the problem ahead another generation, though, as people continue to get older. Perhaps connect the retirement age to cohort life expectancy would be more prudent - and fairer too.
But this is all "easy" problems; easy in the sense that the proximate causes are known, as are the solutions - you even have a good sampling of other societies you can study to find out the anticipated effect of various approaches. The only thing lacking (severely lacking, in the case of the LDP) is political will to actually implement solutions they see as distasteful and socially and morally bankrupt; and yes, to LDP hardliners women with a career qualifies as distasteful - to a fair number of them, female suffrage undoubtedly does. I expect political Japan to come around eventually but it probably needs a political crisis moment of some sort, and a gradual decline doesn't offer one naturally. Having the LDP lose the lower house to DPJ at some point would qualify, I think, or an internal LDP scandal or even party split between the mainline conservatives and the far right.
So what of the decline of rural Japan? The population of Japan peaked last year; up until a year or two ago it was still slowly increasing. By contrast, the countryside depopulation has been going on for well over twenty years now, and perhaps longer. The countryside was more vibrant and alive in 1960 (with, as we saw, a far smaller countrywide population) than today. The rural depopulation has been progressing even as the total population has still been increasing. Population growth is thus not a major factor; it will tend to affect the rate of change, of course, but does not actually determine the fate of the countryside.
Population size change is not a driving factor, but what about the aging of Japan? After all, rural areas have not lost people equally. As communities shrink it is disproportionally the young that leave and the old that stay, making the countryside not just smaller but grayer as well. With fewer young people you get fewer children and with more old people you get higher health and retirement costs with fewer workers. It becomes an exaggerated over-the-top version of Japanese population change, with every problem blown up to caricature size. But the reason for that is not population size, but population movement and specifically urbanization, the subject of the next post.
Monday, November 19, 2007
The Decline of the Japanese Countryside
There's been a lot in the news lately about two population trends in Japan. One trend is the disappearing countryside and rural towns in Japan. The other trend is the declining birth rate and the resulting decline in total population. Many commentators take it for given that one is the cause for the other. I'm going to maintain here that it is not; instead it is the third - largely silent - trend of urbanization that is the main cause.
The reason for this long post is that Shisaku, an always interesting blog on political life in Japan, posted a series of posts (here, here and here) which I replied to. I realized, however, that I hadn't really formulated my thoughts on this in a clear manner and came off as somewhat disjointed. So here an attempt to argue my standpoint at length.
In short, I will argue that population decline is not connected to the disappearing countryside while urbanisation is; that population decline is unlikely to be a truly long-term trend or all that serious if it is; that none of these trends are actually large-scale bad; and that far from making Japan a population basket-case these trends are simply making Japan become more like most other industrialised countries in the world.
First, though, a disclaimer: I am not a social scientist of any kind. I don't actually know any more about this than any random guy pontificating in a bar. But I am an academic in a different field however, so writing belaboured, authoritative-sounding prose comes naturally. Which may lure the unwary to falsely conclude that I seem to know what I am talking about. I don't.
I will talk about population decline and urbanization in later posts - the whole thing gets too long otherwise - but first, the depopulation of the countryside.
Most famous lately has been the town of Yubari in Hokkaido. It is a former mining town that tried to spend itself out of a declining population and financial difficulties. By the time it went bancrupt it had spent billions of yen on various well-meant but ultimately doomed projects and is now forced to close all non-essential services including six out of seven schools and the hospital and lay off the majority of all town employees (the largest employer in town after the mine closed).
The problem for Yubari is of course that it only became a town only because of the mine, and without it the town really doesn't have any particular economic reason to exist anymore. With most service now trimmed off - and to be fair it was all scaled for a long-gone population several times the current size - and employment crashing, it now risks following a lot of other similar towns in Japan into oblivion.
And indeed, as Shisaku posts above, many other small communities are struggling or already dying. In the news a year or two ago was a small village that decided to disband and sell the land to become a landfill. The villagers were all old and frail and expected to need to move to the nearby city soon in any case, and the landfill operator preferred to use an area already marked by human use over unspoiled countryside. But for every village you hear about in the news there are many that silently succumb to depopulation and old age.
So, what could the causes be, and what can be done about it? The next post will be a look at the other recent headline trend: population decline.
The reason for this long post is that Shisaku, an always interesting blog on political life in Japan, posted a series of posts (here, here and here) which I replied to. I realized, however, that I hadn't really formulated my thoughts on this in a clear manner and came off as somewhat disjointed. So here an attempt to argue my standpoint at length.
In short, I will argue that population decline is not connected to the disappearing countryside while urbanisation is; that population decline is unlikely to be a truly long-term trend or all that serious if it is; that none of these trends are actually large-scale bad; and that far from making Japan a population basket-case these trends are simply making Japan become more like most other industrialised countries in the world.
First, though, a disclaimer: I am not a social scientist of any kind. I don't actually know any more about this than any random guy pontificating in a bar. But I am an academic in a different field however, so writing belaboured, authoritative-sounding prose comes naturally. Which may lure the unwary to falsely conclude that I seem to know what I am talking about. I don't.
I will talk about population decline and urbanization in later posts - the whole thing gets too long otherwise - but first, the depopulation of the countryside.
Most famous lately has been the town of Yubari in Hokkaido. It is a former mining town that tried to spend itself out of a declining population and financial difficulties. By the time it went bancrupt it had spent billions of yen on various well-meant but ultimately doomed projects and is now forced to close all non-essential services including six out of seven schools and the hospital and lay off the majority of all town employees (the largest employer in town after the mine closed).
The problem for Yubari is of course that it only became a town only because of the mine, and without it the town really doesn't have any particular economic reason to exist anymore. With most service now trimmed off - and to be fair it was all scaled for a long-gone population several times the current size - and employment crashing, it now risks following a lot of other similar towns in Japan into oblivion.
And indeed, as Shisaku posts above, many other small communities are struggling or already dying. In the news a year or two ago was a small village that decided to disband and sell the land to become a landfill. The villagers were all old and frail and expected to need to move to the nearby city soon in any case, and the landfill operator preferred to use an area already marked by human use over unspoiled countryside. But for every village you hear about in the news there are many that silently succumb to depopulation and old age.
So, what could the causes be, and what can be done about it? The next post will be a look at the other recent headline trend: population decline.
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