Very Low Fertility in Japan and Value Change Hypotheses

Fertility in Japan dropped below replacement level in the middle of the 1970s and declined further since the middle of the 1980s, having reached the total fertility rate (TFR) of 1.42 in 1995. There is much evidence to show that such fertility decline occurred directly as the result of the rise in the proportion never married and the rise in the age at marriage and age at childbearing. In this article the author tries to examine whether value change hypotheses as proposed for explaining below replacement fertility in the West are applicable to the fertility decline in Japan. According to various nationally representative time-series and comparable attitudinal surveys which have been undertaken in the post-war period by various institutes, there has hardly been any dramatic change in attitude toward religion and only a moderate change from social conformism toward individualistic attitude over the last 40 years. In contrast, there has been a tremendous attitudinal change related to women’s social and family roles, in such areas as premarital sex, divorce, gender-role division, and the care of elderly parents, especially since the middle of the 1980s. All these survey results suggest that the rapid rise in the proportion never married in Japan in this latest decade can be related to the change in the value system regarding women’s social and familial role and status, a change toward the valuation of a gender equal society, rather than to secular individuation or the end of a child-centered society. 1. Factors behind Fertility Decline below the Replacement Level After going through fertility transition from the traditional high fertility regime to the modern low fertility regime by the end of the 1950s, the total fertility rate (TFR) in Japan stayed around the replacement level for more than a dozen years. But the TFR fell below the replacement level in the mid-1970s, and entered a new phase of fertility decline (Fig. 1). The trends in fertility for the two decades after the mid-1970s can be divided into two periods. Although fertility fell below the replacement level, the earlier period from 1973 to 1984 saw signs of a temporary rise, and the TFR in 1984 remained still at 1.81—about the same level as those of Britain, France, and the USA, which had the highest fertility rate among developed [ 1 ] The original article was written in Japanese as “Nihon no Cho-shosanka-gensho to Kachikanhendo-kasetsu (Very Low Fertility in Japan and Value Change Hypotheses)” Jinko Mondai Kenkyu (Journal of Population Problems), 53(1) 1997, 3–20, with an English summary. National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. * Director-General, National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.