now the number of children in japan is
at its lowest since 1950 figures
released by the internal affairs
ministry says there are just over 14.6
million children in the country under
the age of 14. japan's falling birth
rate and high life expectancy replacing
huge pressures on public spending and
resulting in labour shortages
our global population correspondent
stephanie hegerty has been looking into
the story
this is part of a global trend that
we're seeing in all advanced economies
and a lot of developing economies too
and and it's dating back to after the
war as more women enter the workforce
they decide to delay having children and
they have less children as a result
because the window of opportunity for
having children is shorter but what
we're seeing in japan
is that this is accelerated i mean the
japanese government didn't expect to be
seeing these numbers until about 2028 so
it's accelerating quite rapidly and
that's for various reasons what happens
globally is when we have shocks
especially financial shocks that leads
people to
take a step back and decide maybe it's
not the time to have a child now and we
saw that in the 2008 crash saw that in
the late 90s in asia and we saw it
during the pandemic
so these these patterns are definitely
accelerating and what tends to happen
what happened after 2008 is people don't
uh
they don't go backwards you know once
society decides to have less children
they don't tend to then go back to
having more later i mean over the years
i i sort of can't um forget images i'd
seen of children
sitting at their mother's desks under
under the desk in the workplace in japan
because things like child care are not
necessarily readily available the whole
structure and system of the workplace
isn't necessarily tailored for a woman
to be able to have those support
networks i think there's two dynamics
that are playing out not just in japan
but in their neighbors china and south
korea where you've got these very
advanced economies with a lot of women
in work japan's got one of the highest
ratios of women in the workplace higher
than the us for example but it's also
got really profound gender imbalances in
domestic work so the amount of time on
average the japanese man father spends
doing work at home is 41 minutes a day
compared to the us which is two and a
half hours a day so this profound gender
imbalance seems to be leading a lot of
japanese women to say i don't want that
life i don't want to have to do
everything at home and i don't want to
have to work very hard and then you've
also got this notorious work culture
where people are expected to really put
in the hours and that's just not
compatible with family life
that's our correspondent stephanie
hegerty reporting there well that's it
from me and the team here on impact you
can catch me on twitter i'm at bbc yalda
hakim goodbye for now