Japan's Birth Crisis: The Pressure on Women to Have Children

2023-05-02 00:49:15

The birth crisis in Japan is a reality, it is not just a joke that fewer and fewer babies are born on Japanese lands. In fact, the population of this Asian powerhouse has declined for the twelfth year in a row, as deaths rise and the birth rate continues to decline. Let’s remember that Japan has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, as well as one of the highest life expectancies.which causes more old people than children to travel through the streets.

However, the elderly are not economically viable for Japan, especially since they cannot become the workforce over time, and since there are no young people who aspire to take the job positions, a demographic crisis is forming that little little by little it also translates into an economic crisis. For this reason, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is clear that support for raising children is the most important policy of the current government, and that the problem “simply cannot wait any longer.”

However, it seems that not all women in Japan agree with this. The intense campaigns to convince couples to have children have had an unexpected effect: more and more women believe that they are being pressured to give birth and become mothers. This was stated in an article in the media The Asahi Shimbun:

Sculptor Nao Sawa, 46, lives in Tokyo with her husband, a businessman, who is eight years her senior. She grew up with verbal abuse from her mother every day. So she decided that she would never in her life have children. He assures that “he does not know how to love, so he could repeat the same mistake with his children.” For this He himself has never felt envy when he sees other happy families with children.
However, she has felt an invisible pressure that she should have a child. When one of her friends told her that having a child would change her life forever, she couldn’t help but feel upset. It wasn’t until she was 40 that she stopped feeling pressured. “At my age, no one tells me to have a child anymore. I made the decision not to have a child, and now it seems ridiculous to me to look for a reason to not have them,” the woman declared.
On the other hand, a 43-year-old woman who works as a nurse in the Kanto Region She couldn’t help but feel disturbed when she read a phrase that was trending on Twitter: “Women who are over 40 and never married are crazy.” Involuntarily, she felt alluded to. She is in her 40s, not married and has no children. The phrase she described perfectly. And it is that when she was 32 years old, she was diagnosed as infertile.
And regarding the intense government campaign to combat the decline in births, she commented: “I think it’s good to support those who want to have children“. However, she does not know what to answer every time she is asked if she wants to have children. “I think society is putting immense pressure on me, as if they consider me useless for not being able to have children.“he commented.
Even before discovering that she was barren, she had thought that one day she would have a child and raise it. He received comments from his acquaintances such as: “Why don’t you get married?”; “You shouldn’t be working all the time”; “Your classmates are already going to have their second child”; so it took her about ten years to tell her mother that she could never have children. She confessed it to him through tears, and the only thing that could calm her down was the fact that her mother accepted it. “I don’t want society to impose values on me about giving birth or not. Marriage, pregnancy and childbirth. Each of us must make that choice.“.