Exit, Voice, and Family Policy in Japan:
Limited Changes Despite Broad Recognition of the Declining Fertility Problem
Leonard Schoppa
May 20, 2009
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University of Virginia
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Submitted for review by the Journal of European Social Policy


Exit, Voice, and Family Policy in Japan: Limited Changes Despite Broad Recognition of the Declining Fertility Problem

Abstract:

Japanese policymakers have been troubled by the ‘declining fertility problem’ for two decades, ever since a sharp drop in births raised public awareness of the issue in 1990. This paper explores why it took a full decade before government officials diagnosed the problem and called for a shift toward gender-egalitarian labor market policies on the model of Sweden in order to reverse the fertility decline. It also asks why the prescribed changes have yet to be adopted, despite continued hand-wringing over fertility rates. Both delays, it argues, stem from the ability of Japanese women—who began entering the workforce in an era when they had already gained full control of their fertility—to ‘exit’ by postponing or opting out of motherhood. This deprived the reform movement of the ‘voice’ needed to transform male-breadwinner structures that are rooted, not only in public policies, but also in private sector practices.

Keywords: family policy; Japan; women; fertility; gender

Going into the 2009 general election campaign, all of Japan’s political parties are touting their agenda for ‘addressing the declining fertility problem’ (shōshika taisaku). The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which is seen as the more progressive party, places its pro-child policy near the top of its agenda. It supports increasing the child allowance from about $75 a month for children under twelve to $260 a month for children under fifteen to help reduce the costs of child-rearing. Not to be outdone, the incumbent Liberal Democratic Party is proposing to pay families $3,500 upon the birth of a child. Ahead of the 2007 election, the party published a ‘Child Assistance Road Map’ (LDP 2007) showing the many forms of aid and assistance available to women at each stage of a child’s growth.

In some respects, the proposals being discussed during this election are impressive. The sums of money politicians are willing to spend on children are huge, especially given the Japanese welfare state’s bias toward spending on the elderly. It is also striking to anyone who followed the policy debate when Japanese first began discussing the ‘declining fertility problem’ in 1990 how openly politicians are looking to the state to solve this problem. Back then, feminists objected to characterizations of the trend as a ‘problem’ because they worried that the state might use restrictions on abortion to push women to have more children, as it had in its ‘give birth and multiply’ (umeyo fuyaseyo) policies before and during the Pacific War. Japanese bureaucrats similarly hesitated to identify increasing the birth rate as a goal, worried that this might cause some to label them as dangerous pronatalists. In contrast, in recent years one can hear women’s movement leaders speak without hesitation about declining fertility as a ‘problem’, and politicians speak loudly over campaign sound-trucks about how they are committed to doing everything possible to boost the nation’s fertility rate.

While the debate has certainly evolved in these respects, twenty years after the nation began talking about these issues, the discussion has actually regressed. Instead of trying to help women achieve work-family balance, the latest plans being touted by the DPJ and LDP are based on the hope that baby bonuses will encourage women to have more children. The LDP’s ‘Road Map’ (2007) was printed on pink paper, with flowers and hearts decorating its pages, and featured the image of a forking highway, with one road for ‘working mothers’ and one for women who stay at home with their children. The roads did not merge back together, and there were no references to what fathers were doing.

Which brings me to the biggest disappointment. A decade ago, between 1997 and 1999, the Ministry of Health and Welfare (MHW), published a series of reports that recognized that the fundamental problem causing the fertility decline was the fact that Japan’s lifetime employment system and gender norms imposed huge opportunity costs on women who chose to marry and have children. The norm that women are responsible for virtually all work in the home, combined with employer expectations that workers in career jobs devote their lives to the company, made it difficult for women to stay in such positions after having children. Yet the employment system made it virtually impossible to move back into these jobs after taking time off for child-rearing. Together, these structures guaranteed that Japanese women pay a tremendous price for their decisions to have children.

The MHW went further than merely diagnosing the problem in this way. It also pointed toward a quite radical solution by citing data from the OECD which showed that the nations with higher fertility rates had relatively gender-egalitarian employment systems, with high rates of women working and women’s salaries closer to male levels. Sweden was at the high end of that regression line, with relatively high levels of gender equality and high fertility rates. Japan was at the low end of both measures. The data was quite suggestive: to move toward higher fertility rates, Japan needed to restructure its employment system and gender norms to make them more similar to the Swedish model.

Unlike the situation in Germany and some other European states, however, this paradigm shift did not take root in Japan.[1] There were some efforts to help new mothers stay in work through childcare leave and flextime, but the policies have had minimal effects on the statistics above. Instead of taking these reforms to the logical next step—dismantling a lifetime employment system that is a poor fit with the extra demands women and men have on their time when they have children—the leading parties have reverted to bribery: $3,500 now or $260 a month for your child. While these numbers are bigger than the financial supports now available, they remain far short of the actual costs a woman bears when she leaves a career job to care fulltime for her family or settles for low-wage part-time work. Moreover, the extra money for families (if approved) will do nothing to offset the losses to the woman’s own earning-power, which means women with children will continue to be heavily dependent on their husbands.

This paper seeks to explain why the paradigm shift that began to emerge in the late 1990s did not take root and in this way limited Japan’s family policy change. I emphasize two factors which limited the degree of change in thinking. First, Japanese women were slow to find their voice because of what I call the ‘exit dynamics’ of their situations. Women who had exited from work to become fulltime housewives had no personal incentive to campaign for labor market reforms that would do them little good because they had given up work many years earlier. Neither did women who had opted out of motherhood in order to devote themselves to careers have an incentive to modify the rules after it was too late for them to go back and start a family. Instead of a vibrant women’s movement to push forward the agenda articulated by the MHW, Japan got a ‘silent revolution’ in which women mostly accommodated the forced choice of the system and exited either motherhood or careers.

The other factor that got in the way of a paradigm shift in Japan was the relatively private nature of the Japanese system of social protection. Although labor law undergirds the lifetime employment system, it is also held up by firms that rely on workers with high firm-specific skills to maintain their competitive edge (Estevez-Abe 2008). Firms reliant on skilled workers have been hesitant to move away from an employment system that fits their needs. The norms that dictate who does the childrearing and housework are also rooted in the private sector, among employers and husbands and women themselves. The fact that key structures imposing opportunity costs on mothers were based in the private sector meant that the bar for ‘paradigm shift’ was much higher in Japan than in some other nations. Those who recognized what was needed had to do more than just convince the bureaucrats or political leaders. They also had to convince employers and husbands to change their practices and behavior. That was where the ‘silent revolution’ really came up short.

The paper is organized as follows. Section 1 lays out the logic of my ‘exit dynamics’ explanation by drawing out the implications of Albert Hirschman’s exit-voice framework for an area of politics and public policy that has not previously been viewed through this lens: women’s movements and family policy. Section 2 describes what Japanese family policy was like before it came under scrutiny in the 1990s and examines how the choices available to women shaped the ‘exit dynamics’ of the issues area. Section 3 then examines how Japan’s policy response was hampered by the absence of a vigorous exit-driven or voice-driven reform drive and the private nature of many of the family policy structures.

EXIT DYNAMICS AND FAMILY POLICY

All industrialized nations, including ones like Sweden that now have progressive family policies, once had male-breadwinner systems that assumed most women would stay at home to take care of the children while relying on their husbands’ work and social benefits. Most of these systems were challenged by women and government policymakers several decades ago as women started entering the workforce. Women coping with the challenges of working while caring for children agitated for help from the state, employers, and their husbands. At the same time, government officials saw that employers could only bring women into the workforce if the state provided more social services to support working mothers and began expanding these programs (Gelb 1989; Morgan 2006).

Not all nations, however, have seen women enter the workforce at the same pace or at the same time. While Sweden saw women move into the workforce in large numbers in the 1960s and 1970s, Japan did not see a significant surge until the 1990s.[2] This difference in timing, I argue, helps explain why family policy in late-to-gender-role-change Japan has not evolved in the same way that it did in nations that saw women enter the workforce in large numbers two decades earlier. What happened in the interim is that women gained full control of their fertility by securing liberal access to birth control and abortion services, allowing them to postpone and more easily opt out of motherhood. Women also secured normative changes that are more approving of sex outside of marriage and delayed marriage, which again allow women more freedom to delay or opt out of motherhood as well. The result of these developments is a very different set of ‘exit dynamics’ in late-to-gender-role-change nations like Japan that has important implications for the politics surrounding family policy.

When Swedish women began entering the workforce in large numbers, women still tended to start their families at a young age. As Figure 1 shows, Swedish women in 1960 entered their peak child-bearing years in their early 20s. By 29, the average woman had 1.46 children. By 34, she had 1.9. This meant that when Swedish firms began looking to women to fill their growing labor force demands in the 1960s and when Swedish women began looking for work, most of the women who could go into the workforce already had children at home. These women had no ‘exit option’, no way of opting out of having children, if they wanted to work.

In contrast, by the time Japanese women started entering the work force in large numbers in the 1990s, they already had secured the birth control and abortion rights, and normative changes governing sex and marriage, that led to delayed fertility and the ability to delay it further. Figure 1 shows how Japanese fertility patterns in 2000 contrast with the pattern in 1960 Sweden. The average Japanese woman of age 29 had just 0.72 children (half the Swedish rate in 1960), and the average woman of 34 had 1.18 (40 percent of the Swedish rate). This meant that when Japanese firms sought to hire women to fill labor force needs, there was a large cohort of childless women they could recruit, without having to do anything to change employment practices to accommodate mothers with children. Even more important, when these women sought to go into the workforce, they were able to enter child-free and work just like men in jobs designed for ‘salarymen’. And if they wanted to stay in these jobs, they had the ability to delay or opt out of motherhood (or ‘exit’) in order to accommodate rules that made it difficult for mothers to stay in or return to career jobs.

In order to understand the implication of this difference in exit dynamics, I propose, we need to draw on the framework developed by Hirschman in his 1970 book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. By ‘exit’ he meant uncoordinated, individual action such as removing one’s children from a state school out of frustration with the quality of schooling or buying a Volvo rather than a General Motors vehicle out of concern that GM cars are not safe enough. The ability to ‘opt out of motherhood’, I propose, is analogous to these kinds of market choices. Such decisions are made by women one at a time, and are generally not coordinated in any way. Hirschman contrasted ‘exit’ with the alternative of ‘voice’, by which he meant a political process such as organizing a petition to force a principal to fire an incompetent teacher or joining a non-governmental organization to pressure auto firms to build safer vehicles. Clearly, the decisions of women to join women’s groups, or work through their unions for new childcare leave benefits, or to demand that their husbands do more housework are examples of the exercise of ‘voice’.