Discussion
The 269th Japan Specialist Seminar was held online on September 27, 2022. With 70 participants, SASANO Misae, a visiting research fellow at East Asian Center, Seoul National University Asia Research Institute, discussed how the causes for low birth rate in Korea and Japan are different.
The presenter first looked into the low birth rate and related countermeasures of the two countries. Despite its greater amount of budget allocated and diversity of policies, Korean government has been discouraged of its efforts to shift the trend by a continuous decline of the birth rate which is falling more rapidly than that of Japan. In order to understand such phenomenon, the speaker focused on the “change in family value” as a background factor.
As she discussed the orientation and speed of family value changes that are spreading among young women in Korea and Japan, the presenter pointed out that the two countries’ differences derived from structural changes since the 1990s economic crisis. She went on to explain the differences in three aspects: women’s participation in the labor market; women’s higher educational attainment, the nature and direction of policies on family/women.
Q/A followed after the presentation. First, there was a question about the recent recovering tendency of Japanese birth rate and future prospect of marriage and birth rate in Japan. The speaker responded by mentioning the demographic analysis that explains the increasing tendency to have been affected by the “Dankai junior” generation’s childbirth at a later age. However, she added that the actual number of the new born is still decreasing because the actual population of women in their ‘childbearing’ age is not very large. Moreover, she talked about a greater possibility of further decline in marriage and fertility rate in Japan as Japanese women’s view on marriage and childbirth is more negative than that from a decade ago.
In addition, the seminar was concluded after discussions on Korean feminist movements being delivered real-time to Japan through social media and receiving positive responses, relationship between Korean perspective on family and rising housing prices, comparison between Korea and Japan’s family costs, background for high rate of temporary workers and relatively lower educational attainment of Japanese women, materialist and individualist tendency simultaneously displayed in Korean young women and the gap between such tendency and high social consciousness.
