This article is from WeChat public account:Zero Japan (zhrb2019), author: Dong Jian Jun, from the title figure: vision China


——The first analysis of the problem of aging children in Japan

As the old topic of Chinese people vomiting in Japan all the year round, “small child”, “low desire” and “unmarried and infertile” have always been regarded as inherent cognition, firmly attached to the head of the Japanese archipelago, and even have China. Since the media compiled a poem – “Do not love not to marry, do not give birth to a baby, the island people are more than amazed; the Japanese government has broken the heart, the house man and the house will not listen; the old age and the child will be double, the Yamato nation will perish!” >

Does Japan “break the grandchildren”? Not only friends who are concerned about current issues, but some friends who plan to invest in Japanese real estate are also inquiring. If the new population is insufficient, the property price will definitely be difficult to maintain.

Is it a threatening statement or is it an exaggeration? Let’s analyze this topic today.

1. Throughout Northeast Asia, Japan’s fertility rate is almost the highest

First, the fact that an estimate is inconsistent with most people’s perceptions is the fertility rate in Japan (the average number of children per woman during childbearing age, country)The average fertility measurement data is almost the highest in Northeast Asia. Even if it is placed in the entire East Asian section for comparison, in addition to the economic situation, the Philippines and other countries, for the 18th in the world in terms of per capita income, the fertility rate is already the light of East Asia.

(Source: National Statistics Department and World Bank Database)

Some people are always saying how bad the Japanese are, and how bad the consequences are. But don’t look at the environment you are in…

And it cannot be ignored that Japan has achieved such a fertility rate under very congenital conditions. The Japanese women’s employment equality index ranks 79th in the world, and the income equality index ranks 45th. Both the index and the sex ratio at birth are ranked first in the world.

These data are excellent in Northeast Asia, which means that the resistance of Japanese women to their daily work is not large. The more equal income indicators will encourage more women to go out to work. Although the overall level of equality between men and women in Japan is relatively poor, only women with economic ability and high education level can live a free life they want without relying on men.

As a result, since 2009, the net number of women in Tokyo has surpassed that of men. By 2018, there are 14,000 more women than men in the field. The first goal of almost 90% of Japanese women to leave their hometown is the Tokyo area.

There is nearly half of the Japanese marriageable women who want their fiancé’s annual income to be more than 4 million yen. However, 70% of Japanese married men’s actual annual income is below 4 million yen. ……

So how did such a contradiction arise? How did Japan achieve first-class fertility performance in Northeast Asia under this “heavy resistance” situation?

2. Unbroken birth culture

If you take a walk on the streets of Japan, you will find a phenomenon: many Japanese families have two or more children, and the situation of only one is not mainstream. In 2016, Chinese businessman Hong Xiuping published a essay in the news, “Japan makes me feel the most is a lot of children,” which is the phenomenon –

“No matter the city or the country, whether it is on the street or on the subway, especially in the tourist attractions such as Universal Studios, I have seen too many families with many children. The family of two children is very common, three or four. Children’s families are not uncommon.

In my residential area in Japan, I can still see many bicycles with twin-child seats, which is almost invisible in China. Bicycles with twin-child seats are generally suitable for families with two children of similar age. I asked Japanese friends and Chinese friends in Japan. They all said that there are few families with only one child in Japan, and families with two or three children are very common. Even four children are not uncommon.

Effective double child seat electric bicycles on the streets of Japan

The authoritative data also confirms the impression that the “National 15th Birth Trend Basic Survey Report” published by the National Institute of Social Security and Population Studies in Japan shows that until 2015, among married families in Japan, 54% of couples will have 2 children, 17.9% will have 3 children, and even 3.3% will have 4 or more births, while only 18.6% of them will only be born. The children only accounted for 6.2%.

Is it completely different from the imaginary Japan?

In fact, the birth culture of the Japanese, who is either not born or born with at least two, is not something that has existed in recent years, but a long-standing tradition. According to the “Japanese Population and Family in Historical Perspectives” written by the Third Senate of the Japanese Senate in 2006, 11.8% of Japanese women did not have children in the Meiji era before 1890 (this ratio is not too low today). It can be seen that “no children” is not a new problem), and correspondingly, 66.8% of women will have more than 4…

When the World War II, from the Japanese baby boomer “general generation”, the two became officially the absolute mainstream of Japanese families. It is not difficult to see from the statistical charts that whether it is the agricultural age, the industrial age, the technological age, the war era or the peaceful era, no matter how the social form changes, the Japanese only need to get married, and rarely have no children, only one is not. The mainstream, more commonly, is to have two or more.

According to the 2015 data of the “Bearing Trend Survey”, among those who have the willingness to marry, 80.4% of unmarried men and 83.9% of unmarried women want to have two children or more after marriage. As long as one child or not born is less than 10%.

may havePeople will ask, so the Japanese who love life, why is the overall fertility rate lower now? In fact, in addition to the decline in family fertility, the most important reason is that many Japanese have chosen not to enter marriage, which is the most fundamental reason for lowering the fertility rate throughout Japan. According to the NHK survey, 88% of people in Japan around the age of 30 accept lifelong disembarkment.

According to the National Population Institute, 69.8% of Japanese young men and 59.1% of Japanese young women have been single for a long time, and more than half of them said they do not want to leave the list. In addition, an average of 42% of unmarried men and 44.2% of unmarried women do not have any sexual experience…

3. The best fertility environment in East Asia

The other thing to note is that many people who are worried about Japan’s “severe grandchildren” may not know that Japan already has the best fertility environment in East Asia.

In the first aspect, according to Zhou Chenghui, a system economist, if a couple live in an apartment with only one or two rooms, then the couple must be hard to have children; if a couple live alone The big house, there are many empty rooms, and even the yard outside the room, then their fertility will be easy to come up.

The apartment is almost the first killer of a child, and this theory has been consistent with the data performance of many countries in the world. For more information on this theory, please search for the article “Apartment Building: The First Killer of Fertility in Europe and East Asia”.

In Japan, where the country is small, only 42.2% of the houses are apartment buildings, and most of the rest of the families live in single-family houses. Regardless of South Korea, Singapore or China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao, the average residential density is much larger than that of Japan, and the fertility rate is naturally difficult to upgrade.

It can be said that it is these “one-house construction” that accompany the small balls, the wilder than Daxiong, and the crayons Xiaoxin, which guards the future of Japan.

On the other hand, the Japanese government and society have been working hard to create a big environment where more families can feel at ease.

Either fertility subsidies, monthly subsidies, free medical treatment for children, or free kindergartens just implemented this year, even building barrier-free facilities (eliminating the height difference between stations, shopping malls, and doors, building barrier-free elevators, children’s toilets) And the breastfeeding room) are the goodwill of the entire Japanese society for children and fertility.

After all, these payments are often deducted from the taxes paid by the nationals, especially the newly increased consumption tax. One of the main points of the trip is to subsidize the kindergarten free policy. Not to mention that families raising children can also pay less taxes.

4. There is still much room for improvement in Japan’s minority child problem

However, after all, Japan’s fertility rate is still declining. Do you need to worry about it?

It should be said that although Japan recognizes the harm of “small child”, the degree of understanding and the intensity of countermeasures are difficult to say. Of course, on the other hand, Japan still has a lot of room for improvement on this issue.

For example, in 1994, Japan launched the “Angel Project”. The government focused on improving the environment for children entering kindergartens, extending the working hours of kindergartens, and helping working women to raise children while working. The plan has invested 600 billion yen in five years, but this industry fine-tuning is not very effective. In 1999, the Japanese government introduced a new version of the “New Angel Project.” But Japan’s fertility rate has fallen from 1.57 in 1989 to 1.26 in 2004.

Until the 21st century, Japan’s maternity benefits began to increase substantially, from subsidizing the birth of a family of more than three children to a child’s allowance. The government is fully responsible for the financial burden from pregnancy to childcare. The Democrats who came to power in 2009 promised to give monthly cash subsidies to every child under the age of 15.

Although this puts the government on a heavy financial burden, Japan’s fertility rate has slowly climbed from 1.26 in 2004 to more than 1.4 in 2017. Japan’s policy of stimulating fertility has still played a role.

In fact, from the practice of European countries, cash subsidies have always been the most direct way to encourage fertility. Moreover, the sooner the state intervention, the greater the intensity, the better the effect. A study based on Japanese families found that for every 100,000 yen increase in maternity benefits, the birth rate of infants increased by 0.017%. The lower the income of low-income families, the more obvious the increase in fertility.

This is also the potential of Japan –

According to data from the Cabinet Office of Japan, until 2015, Japan’s total expenditure on family welfare (including maternity support, health insurance, life assistance, etc.) accounted for only 1.3% of GDP. This ratio is only half of that of the United Kingdom, Sweden and other countries, and there is a big gap between Italy and Germany.

As a standard “medium welfare state”, Japan does not have the natural endowment and land policy of Europe and the United States, and can only hope to pay more benefits to the newborn family, which is indeed the future development of the Japanese government. direction. Regardless of the ruling party or the opposition party, the focus of propaganda in all parties in Japan today is almost to give benefits to children.

So, the future of Japan is probably a paradise for those who are willing to have children. If the immigration policy is properly relaxed, Japan, which has three neighbors of immigrant countries (the top three source countries of Japanese immigrants), may not be able to welcome the “breaking son” tomorrow as some people have said.

Appendix exclusive data: Japan’s favorite TOP10 area for children and least children.

Because of important data related to fertility, there are two birth rates (new population per thousand) and fertility (average number of children of childbearing age). Then if you arrange all the data in Japan according to these two data, you will get almost completely different results, such as Tokyo.However, the birth rate is the bottom of the country, but the birth rate in Tokyo is the sixth in Japan. This shows that although the mother of Tokyo is born less, there are many mothers who have children in Tokyo.

So how to more intuitively measure the fertility status in all parts of Japan? We have made a weighted statistic of the fertility rate data published by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare and the birth rate data published by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, which has resulted in a more objective and comprehensive Data to measure fertility status across Japan.

The following are the top 10 regions with the worst fertility status in Japan, which is lower than the national average.

  1. Hokkaido (strongly related to latitude climate)

  2. Akita

  3. Iwate

  4. Niigata

  5. Aomori

  6. Nara

  7. Kyoto (basically there are no local residents, and they are often photographed…)

  8. Miyagi

  9. 山形

  10. Chiba (Typhoon landing must pass…)

The following are the 10 regions with the best fertility status in Japan:

  1. Okinawa (whether fertility or birth rate is the first in the country and far ahead)

  2. Kumamoto

  3. Miyazaki

  4. Kagoshima

  5. Saga

  6. Nagasaki

  7. Shiga

  8. Aichi (the capital is Nagoya)

  9. Island Root

  10. Hiroshima

As for Tokyo, Osaka, and Fukuoka, which everyone cares about, Tokyo ranks 25th in the country, only four places higher than the national average, and Osaka is one place higher than Tokyo. Fukuoka is much higher, ranking 14th in the country.

Of course, the new population is only one aspect of determining future housing prices. After all, domestic and foreign immigrants in these cities are more solid manpower guarantees.


This article is from WeChat public account:Zero Japan (zhrb2019), author :东鉴君