When Kentaro Yokobori was born nearly seven years ago, he was the first newborn in Kawakami Village’s Sogyo Ward in 25 years. His birth was a miracle for many fellow villagers, he writes CNN, which notes that the declining birth rate is emblematic of all of Japan, panicking officials as the country is “on the brink of not being able to maintain its social functions.” On the other hand, however, conditions are not created for women to have children and to pursue a career.

“The elderly were very happy to see him [Kentaro], and an elderly woman who was struggling up the stairs, with a cane, came to me to hold my child in her arms. All the elders took turns holding my child,” Miho recalls.

In a quarter of a century with no newborns, the village’s population has more than halved to 1,150 – down from 6,000 40 years ago – as younger residents have moved out and older residents have died. Many houses were abandoned, some overrun by wild animals.

Kawakami is just one of countless rural towns and villages that were forgotten and neglected as young Japanese left for the cities. Over 90% of Japanese people now live in cities such as Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, which are connected by Japan’s high-speed Shinkansen trains, which are always on time.

This has left rural areas and industry, agriculture and forestry facing labor shortages that are likely to worsen in the coming years as the workforce ages. By 2022, the number of people employed in agriculture and forestry has fallen to 1.9 million from 2.25 million 10 years ago.

However, the disappearance of the village of Kawakami is emblematic of a problem that goes beyond the Japanese countryside.

The time for procreation is running out

The problem for Japan is that people in the cities are also not having children, which has made Prime Minister Fumio Kishida panic as time is running out and no one has offspring. “The time for procreation is running out.”

Earlier this year, he warned that the country was “on the brink of not being able to maintain its social functions.”

The country recorded an all-time low of 799,728 births in 2022, just over half of the 1.5 million births recorded in 1982.

The fertility rate – the average number of children born to women in their reproductive years – fell to 1.3, well below the 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population. The death rate has exceeded the birth rate for more than ten years.

And with the lack of significant immigration — Japanese government figures show foreigners made up just 2.2 percent of the population in 2021, compared with 13.6 percent in the United States — some fear the country is headed for a point of no return. the number of women of childbearing age reaches a critically low level, after which it is impossible to change the tendency to decrease the number of the population.

All of this has left leaders in the world’s third-largest economy facing the unenviable task of trying to fund pensions and health care for a growing elderly population even as the workforce shrinks.

Women who gave birth were sent to work part-time

On the other hand, there are long working days that leave no time for Japanese people to raise a family, and the rising cost of living means that having a child is simply too expensive.

At the same time, it is patriarchal principles that discourage mothers from returning to work.

Dr. Yuka Okada, director of the Grace Sugiyama Clinic in Tokyo, says that because of cultural barriers, talking about a woman’s fertility is often taboo.

Okada is one of the few working mothers in Japan who has a very successful career after giving birth. Many of Japan’s highly educated women are relegated to part-time jobs if they manage to reenter the workforce. According to the OECD, in 2021, 39% of employed women were part-time, compared to 15% of men.

Tokyo hopes to address some of these issues so that today’s working women can become mothers and return to work. The Metropolitan Government is starting to subsidize egg freezing to give women a better chance of a successful pregnancy if they decide to have a baby later.