Society Fear of an older future in Japan and South Korea

In 2021, the number of births totalled 811,604, the lowest since records were first kept in 1899, a faster decline than projected by demographic experts. By contrast, the number of centenarians stands at more than 90,500 – compared with only 153 in 1963. Like their counterparts in neighbouring South Korea, Japanese women are increasingly reluctant to marry and have children – deterred by the financial pressures and traditional gender roles that force many to give up work as soon as they become pregnant and shoulder the burden of housework and childcare duties. "I used to think I would be married by 25 and a mother by 27," said Nao Iwai, a university student in Tokyo. "But when I look at my eldest sister, who has a two-year-old girl, I'm afraid to have children.

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The low fertility rate is partly a symptom of the advances Japanese women have made in recent years, says Yuka Minagawa, an associate professor at Sophia University in Tokyo. Better educational attainment and a rise in the number of women in the workplace mean they are marrying, and having children, significantly later than their mothers and grandmothers. "A possible factor for the reluctance of Japanese women to marry is the increasing costs of marriage," Naohiro Yashiro a professor at Showa Women's University, wrote in a recent essay for the East Asia Forum website. "With higher education, more young women have similar wages to men, so their average search period for spouses is longer. Currently, the average age of first marriage for women is 29 years, well beyond the 25 years in the 1980s – when most women were only high school graduates."

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