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Progress of Low Fertility in Japan and Other Asian Countries: A Theoretical Framework

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Low Fertility in Advanced Asian Economies

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Abstract

Developing and emerging countries in Asia are struggling to cope with low fertility, putting their future sustainable growth at risk. The phenomenon of low fertility first emerged in Northern/Western Europe, but today, Asia has become the region with the lowest fertility in the world. This chapter examines the nature of low fertility in Asia compared with that in Europe. In Asia, low fertility and the resulting demographic change are somewhat different from a series of phenomena that occurred during the second demographic transition in Europe. The marriage system remains strong in Asia, as does linkage between marriages and births, which reduces the incidence of both cohabitation and children born to single mothers. The following four hypotheses are proposed as the “big four” factors for low fertility in Asia: (1) loss of employment opportunities for young people and an inflexible labor market; (2) spread of higher education and increasing educational expenses; (3) difficulty of balancing parenting with other roles; and (4) individual values that are not explained by the second demographic transition.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Whether changes in Japan’s birthrate in recent years are due to social factors, policy effects, or is simply a tempo effect is currently being studied. See Goldstein et al. (2009) and Kaneko (2010) for more detail.

  2. 2.

    In the Japanese-style welfare society in the 1970s, households comprising three generations of a family had more advantages regarding elderly care and child-rearing than households in which the adult children lived separately from their parents.

  3. 3.

    These statistics were taken from the annual population and social security surveys in Japan, South Korean fertility surveys, and population trend reports from Singapore for each year.

  4. 4.

    In the survey, regular employees with part-time working hours are included in the regular employment category. Housewives are included in the unemployment category.

  5. 5.

    In the table, the figures for Japan (unit: yen) and Korea (won) represent annual incomes, while that for Singapore (Singapore dollar: SGD) represents a monthly income. Exchange rate according to Reuters at the time of writing (12/17/2018): 1 USD = 113.4 yen = 1131 won = 1.375 SGD.

  6. 6.

    In the feudal family system, the parent–child and conjugal relationships are seen from the view of rights and obligations of autonomous individuals; therefore, children and wives have their own rights, and the position of women is relatively high. In the Confucian family system, filial piety is an absolute obligation; a child is powerless before the father. In addition, the wife’s position is relatively low (see Suzuki 2013, pp. 30–31 for details).

  7. 7.

    See Sim Choon Kiat’s “More Marriages and Babies Wanted—The Impact of Population and Education Policies on Fertility in Singapore,” presented at the National Youth Policy Institute’s open seminar on “The Relation Between Youth Employment and Marriage Experience,” August 25, 2016.

  8. 8.

    For further details, see “About Future Education in University Education” (in Japanese), which is the reference material for the third recommendation (2013) of the Japanese government’s Council for the Revitalization of Education.

  9. 9.

    In Japan, individual’s value toward post-modernism has not been observed after the 1970s (Taromaru 2016).

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  1. Faculty of Contemporary Sociology, Chukyo University, Toyota-shi, Aichi, Japan

    Shigeki Matsuda

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    Shigeki Matsuda

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Matsuda, S. (2020). Progress of Low Fertility in Japan and Other Asian Countries: A Theoretical Framework. In: Matsuda, S. (eds) Low Fertility in Advanced Asian Economies. SpringerBriefs in Population Studies(). Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0710-6_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0710-6_1

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