Linda Levirne passed this along to us -
Where Are the Japanese Children?
During my time in Japan, I married a Japanese woman. When she thought she might be with child, we visited the local clinic. The doctor confirmed that she was indeed pregnant and asked, rather matter-of-factly, whether we wanted to keep the baby. That question left a lasting impression on me. The first time we saw our newborn was from behind the window of a postdelivery room containing 20 little beds. Only two of them were occupied.
A few weeks later, the government sent us about $3,000. I learned this was an incentive to encourage couples to have children. This fascinated me. Until then, I’d been oblivious to Japan’s low-birthrate crisis.
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According to a U.S. annual report, Japan’s population peaked in 2005 and will plunge from its current 127 million to 89 million in 2050. That’s a decline of 30%. The median age in Japan today is 43 years old, the highest in the world. The average age in Japan in 2050 is projected to be 61. An increasing number of Japanese leaders are looking for an easy way out of the dilemma of rapid societal aging — as evidenced by recommendations by the Japanese Association of Acute Medicine to allow euthanasia for the terminally ill.
On last year’s Children’s Day, the government noted that the number of children in Japan had declined for the 26th consecutive year. Over the past decade, more than 2,000 junior and senior high schools closed due to lack of students to teach. As I recently viewed a report on Japanese television stating that more than 60,000 teachers are unemployed, I couldn’t help but wonder if that teacher I met at the one-student school still had a job. That same program reported that nearly 100 children’s theme parks have closed in recent years and that more and more pediatricians are switching specialties to become geriatricians.
Since the 1920s, when Margaret Sanger traveled to Japan to promote contraception and sterilization, the Japanese have embraced the modern notion of “family planning.” One recent poll revealed that 70% of young Japanese single women have no intention of getting married because babies are simply “too much trouble.”
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