Japan's childcare crisis deepens as births hit fresh low for the sixth straight year

TOKYO - The term "parent gacha" trended in Japan last year, a buzzword roughly translated to the fact that a child's future is randomly determined at the point of birth by its parents.

That the term was nominated as one of 2021's top buzzwords in an annual Japanese literary award - gacha refers to a toy capsule dispenser - points to the structural issues that Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will have to confront to stop a fertility crisis from crippling his nation.

The number of childbirths in Japan dropped to a fresh record low in 2021, the sixth year in a row it has done so.

The Health Ministry said, in preliminary data on Friday (Feb 25), that there were 842,897 births, down by 3.4 per cent, or 29,786 babies, from a year ago.

"It is likely that people refrained from getting pregnant due to their anxieties about healthcare and the future as Covid-19 first began to spread," an official analysis of the data said.

Births fell the most year on year in the months of January and February last year, with most of those born in the two months conceived in April and May 2020 just as Japan was in the throes of its first Covid-19 state of emergency.

Childbirths recovered later in the year to slightly below 2020 levels, but were still markedly lower than before the Covid-19 pandemic struck.

Notably, Friday's preliminary figure applies to childbirths among Japanese and foreigners living in Japan, as well as among Japanese overseas. The finalised data later this year will be even worse, applying only to Japanese citizens in Japan.

Japan's fertility rate last year stood at 1.33, which is far less than the government's official target of 1.8 by 2025. This not only appears out of reach, but is below the replacement rate of 2.1 that is required to maintain the population at a constant level.

Japan's leaders have long been flummoxed by what is feared to be an insurmountable challenge, with childbirths in free fall since it dipped below the one million psychological threshold for the first time in 2016.

The Band-Aid approach of offering among the world's most generous childcare policies - new parents can take childcare leave of up to a year and are paid up to 80 per cent of their wages through labour insurance and government benefits - have not gone far enough to tackle structural issues.

The term "parent gacha", which signalled worries about how a parent's socio-economic status gets transferred to their children, reflects a lack of hope as sociologists point to the financial pressures arising from depressed wages and high taxes.

Further, unemployment has hit those in the child-bearing age the hardest. While the overall jobless rate was 2.8 per cent last year, the figure was 3.8 per cent for those aged 25 to 34, and 4.6 per cent for those aged 15 to 24.

Mr Kishida is taking aim at the crisis with a push to raise wages, especially among the middle class, under the redistributive policies as proposed under the banner of his "new style of Japanese capitalism".

He will also launch a new Children and Family Agency in April next year to serve as a one-stop control centre for all children and family-related policies so as to reduce bureaucratic red tape and create a better environment for child-rearing.

Compounding the fertility crisis is how the number of marriages last year dropped to a post-war low of 514,242 couples, down by 4.3 per cent from 2020. This may further worsen the fertility crisis, as very few babies in Japan are born out of wedlock.

Adding to concerns is the surge in child abuse incidents last year. The National Police Agency said this month that police investigated a record 2,170 child abuse cases last year, up 1.7 per cent from a year ago.

As many as 108,050 minors aged under 18 nationwide were also referred to child welfare centres over suspicion of abuse.

The Health Ministry, meanwhile, said on Friday that there were 1,452,289 deaths last year. This was the highest post-war figure, and was up 67,745 from a year ago.

As a result, the decrease in the natural population - where the number of deaths exceeds that of births - stood at 609,392, exceeding 600,000 for the first time.