Hi All,
As a Japanologist, I am sensitive to the difficulties involved in Japan's rapid aging - both for the government and for individuals. I have friends in Japan who have struggled with work/life decisions about having children when young and then struggled, for biological reasons, to have them when older. I do not see fertility decline as simply the product of "lifestyle choices." And, as a mother who has worked with and around the very high quality but not especially flexible Japanese child care (don't get me started on the American "choices"), I can be counted on to raise a voice in support of enhanced public policy support for families, especially mothers, who still bear the lion's share of childrearing burdens. Also, the data I have looked at on the relationship between men's marriage rates and their incomes suggests that for the many young men who have not managed to obtain regular employment at wages that will rise in predictable ways, marriage and fertility decline is may be as much as symptom of economic marginalization as it is of life choices.

That said, I think we should consider if we are focused on the right questions.

First, demographic decline is, at least in the medium turn, already a done deal. Even if women of child bearing age had a sudden increase in their fertility rates, Japan will still have to deal with a huge population of aged people over the next several decades while those babies are growing up and, somehow, getting educated. Moreover, Japan's economy has changed. The bubble generation could send lots of its members straight from middle school or high school into factories. But where will those factories be in 20 or 30 years? Are we thinking that Japan will return to a former economic structure? For that matter, what about the fact that highly automized factories don't need as many people to operate? This isn't my speciality, so I won't go on, but I do wonder.

Second, I am inclined to agree with the notion that, if it were only possible to manage the miserable effects of it, having fewer people in Japan might be a good thing. I remember a conversation with a recently married friend and her mother in 1993. The mother was insisting that her daughter get down to the work of having babies and even pointed out that Japan was facing a demographic crisis. The daughter (who did eventually have two children) argued with her mother, pointing out how crowded Tokyo was, how small her apartment was, how packed the trains were. Why would anyone not want fewer people in Japan, she asked. When I think about Tokyo as a "heat island" in our rapidly changing climate, I can not but help remember that conversation.

Finally, shouldn't social scientists consider the global problem of thinking about population change mostly in terms of nation states? Without a doubt, considering the demographic decline of one's own nation, or even a nation with which one has a long and loving relationship, as I am sure is the case for many non-Japanese who study Japan, is distressful. But from the more distanced perspective of social science, shouldn't we ask if decline, even if unevenly distributed around the globe, has value for our fellow human beings and for the environment?

We veer back and forth between asking who or what we should blame for decline and asking what we might do to stave it off. What about asking what it would be like to do decline well, justly and with a richer understanding of what constitute good individual and community lives than the race to growth, in Japan but also elsewhere, permitted?

Robin LeBlanc
Washington and Lee University