Very Kind of Him # 52

Steve Miller of Asia News Network has put up the home version of his podcast (some might find the recording studio decor a bit...eccentric). He and I have a short conversation about the bill in the Diet proposing to lower the voting age in national referendums to 18 years of age. (Link - Video)

I know, I know. I have the voice of a 25 year old, at best. As for the photo, I took it at home in October 2013. Really.

For Japanese speakers, here is the link to a report from Fuji Television on Liberal Democratic Party Policy Research Council Chair Inada Tomomi letting the cat out of the bag as regards to what may have always been the goal of the bill (Link - J). Note how she weaves in the theme of "not just rights, citizens must have responsibilities too" found in the LDP's proposed revisions to the Constitution.

And yes, this I wrote about this subject earlier this week.

First Read - 6 March 2015

- The knife attack yesterday on U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Mark Lippert (Link) immediately brought to mind the much more serious stabbing of U.S. Ambassador Edwin Reischauer in Tokyo on 24 March 1964 (Link). However, seemingly only to my mind, as a Google News search of "Reischauer" in katakana returns nothing more recent than reports of the visit of Dr. Kent Calder of the Reischauer Center.

For those historically minded, Dr. George R. Packard, the author of book in the above link and Ambassador Reischauer's special assistant, is still with us. Someone should try to contact him for historical perspective -- especially because he wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the Ampo disturbances.

- For those of us who were wondering, "When only about 33% of those in their twenties vote in national elections, what is the point of lowering the voting age from 20 to 18 years-of-age for national referendums on constitution revisions?" the Liberal Democratic Party let the other shoe drop yesterday. The LDP unveiled plans to have all definitions of adulthood lowered to 18 years of age -- in particular the right to charge (and presumably, in the case of murder, execute) youths 18 and 19 years-of-age as adults. "With rights must come responsibilities (gimu)" intoned LDP policy research chief Inada Tomomi, repeating the conservatives' mantra regarding the Constitution.

That this proposition comes amidst then nation's horror at the murder of 13 year old Uemura Ryota by a gang of youths led by an 18 year old is a mere coincidence.

The Komeito and opposition parties are deeply skeptical about the LDP's plans, saying that changing the legal definition of childhood goes far beyond discussions the parties have had on the subject of altering the franchise. (Link - J)

Just what the LDP has been thinking on the issue of lowering the voting age, aside from a bizarre, "if we can lower the voting age AND change the education system to inculcate hyperpatriotism, making younger voters more ready to vote for us AND we can hang the killer of Uemura Ryota, we will be invincible!" is a mystery.

Then again, what the other parties cooperating on the bill lowering the voting age are thinking is equally mysterious.

As for Inada, a wild, wild guess: though no hint of this has escaped Abe Shinzo's lips, he wants her or Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications Taka'ichi Sanae to succeed him as prime minister.

Live Blogging The Shiomura Press Conference At The FCCJ

16:00 Q and A is being extended but I have to go. Too bad.

15:56 Angela Kubo asks a three-part uestion: how did you feel when Suzuki came before you to apologize, have you forgiven him, and do you think Suzuki is sincere or do you believe he was forced to come forward? Shiomura was shocked at the apology, has no arranged her thoughts and has not forgiven. She recognizes that coming forward to bravery. As for his sincerity, she does not know.

15:55 Q: What do you think about changing laws to increase an assembly member's ability to identify a person who is speaking slanderously? Shiomura [wisely] says changes to the laws and regulations are a last resort.

15:50 Question about Abe's statement today about creating a society where women shine. Shoimura says it is a nice sentiment but that in Tokyo Assembly, this has not yet taken place.

15:40 French journalist questioner offers his sumpathies as French man. Asks her whether she has plans to run for a Diet seat.

15:36 Shiomura notes that yes, Prime Minister Abe has put women's empowerment at the center of his program. He most likely had thoughts about this incident. She wished she could learn what his thoughts are.

15:31 Questioner Friedrich is surprised that a young (for Friedrich, 51 years of age is young) man was the confessed heckler.

15:25 First question is not a question but a diatribe by newsletter writer.

15:24 Shiomura says she will not let the matter rest on Suzuki's apology. He was the not the only one heckling. end of Shiomura statement.

15:20 According to Shiomura, the [LDP]'s caucus in the Tokyo Assembly would not take action to help in the reprimanding of one of its members. Instead the caucus said to her that she had 3 days to provide the name of the perpertrator -- after that the matter would be no longer actionable.

15:15 Shiomura tries "the heckling was not about me personally, this is about the women who are suffering" gambit. [We will have to see how the cynical press goes for that statement]

15:10 She was surprised particularly at everyone laughing and smiling at the loud comments. She had to keep going because she only had 11 minutes.

15:05 Shiomura explains that had been heckled before in committee session but she did not expect such medieval (koten) heckling. She was talking about three subjects: passive smoking, care of dogs and help for women's pregnancy and childbirth issues. She was heckled only during her speaking on the last subject.

15:03 "Thank you for coming here on a busy day"? Stock phrase. Problem: she is talking to a room full of folks for whom coming to hear her speak is them doing their jobs.

15:00 The room is full to bursting, 17 cameras along the back wall. Photographers mob the lectern.

Suggested Exhibition #2

If you find yourself in the vicinity of Ogikubo Station on the Chuo Line and have a few minutes to spare, you might want to walk up to the Suginami Historical Museum's Amanuma Branch Museum (Suginami kuritsu kyodo hakubutsukan bunkan) for a tiny exhibit of mass-produced toys and toy making in the period prior to, during and immediately after the Occupation.

The impact of the march to war upon the toys children play with is not something that often comes to mind when one considers the social history of the Meiji, Taisho and early Showa periods. Big changes came not just the permissible and suggested themes of play but in the materials as well, with metal disappearing from toy making very early during Japan's adventure on the continent, the tin and iron sucked up into industrial production for the war. By the very end, toy makers were reduced to making toys out of celluloid and thin strips of bamboo.

Particularly fascinating are the pair of Occupation era propaganda films on the postwar birth of a workshop toy making industry. Waste (empty tin cans) from the U.S. military's canteens and clubs became the raw material for an almost entirely hand-powered process producing toy cars for export.

A whole world of asides ("And into tin toys beat our trash/nations shall learn war no more"; "Japanese were exporting cars only a few years after the surrender, only these were made of tin"; "Yeah, and that must have been the last time an American bigshot could be smiling at a display of Japanese cars ready for export"...) come to mind as one watches the films, which are showing in a continuous loop on the video monitor next to the staircase.

Lovers of historical irony will probably like the jellied alcohol-fueled model nuclear power station in the later postwar section of the exhibit, as well as toys of the 1930s proclaiming Japan's military might.

The exhibit runs through December 1. There are special programs on the 20th of this month and on November 3.

Information on the bunkan (Japanese only) can be found here.

Oh, How To Play This One!

Judging from the responses when searching Google News in Japanese, the domestic media has not yet reported on this story:

Fourth star for Harry Harris
Pensecola News Journal

Pensacola becomes the home of lots of military brass, and this area also produces its share of high-ranking officers.

Harry B. Harris Jr., a 1974 graduate of Booker T. Washington High School, has been nominated by President Barack Obama for his fourth star as a Navy admiral, the Pentagon announced on Tuesday.

With the promotion, Harris, a vice admiral who is now assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is scheduled to be assigned to command the U.S. Pacific Fleet, the Navy said.

As commander of the Pacific Fleet, Harris will oversee the world’s largest sea operation, encompassing more than half the Earth’s surface and including about 1,100 aircraft, 200 ships and submarines and roughly 140,000 military and civilian personnel.

Harris, 56, is the son of a Navy enlisted man and a Japanese woman who worked for the military as a civilian translator...

(Link)

So after the local mediaverse gets off its duff, how will this country's bloodline-conscious interpret a hafu's taking over as proconsul for the Indo-Pacific?

Wow, do I ever see the opportunity for misunderstandings here...oh, and a lot of images of excruciatingly bad gift swaps too.

It is just after 4:30 in the morning. What are the chances that NHK has a camera crew in Harris's mother's nominal furusato right now, interviewing seniors who would rather be watering their plants?

Tip of the hat to Paul Giarra for the link.


Later - Yes, I agree. It will be interesting to see this news is parsed in China.

Duck And Cover, HPV Edition

Yesterday, a government advisory panel to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare recommended that doctors stop encouraging patients to be vaccinated against the HPV virus. Following a spate of reports of lingering pain from the shots and the organization of a parents support group of purported victims, the panel concluded that the ministry that should ask doctors to suspend the practice of telling patients and their parents that receiving the shots is a good idea. (Link - J)

An oddity in this story is the lack of agreement on how many cases of mysterious pains have been reported. NHK is reporting 33 cases, with 8 patients still suffering from unresolved pain. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun is reporting 38 cases out of the 3.28 million patients who have received the shots since November of 2010 (Link - J). The Asahi Shimbun is reporting 43 cases over the same timespan (Link). The Mainichi Shimbun is also reporting 43 cases, with 11 of them with still unresolved pain. (Link- J)

Ostensibly, all these news organizations had their representatives at yesterday's meeting, or received the reports of the advisory panel's recommendatoin. How can the numbers coming out of the meeting be all over the map?

Since the panel has not recommended a halt in the vaccinations, it is difficult to assess what it is recommending the MHLW ask doctors to do. The incidence of mysterious pains is around 1 in 100,000, with the instances of lasting pains less than 1 in 300,000. At the same time, known adverse reactions to the vaccine (such as anaphalactic shock) numbered over 10,000. That and the fact that cervical cancer kills 2,700 Japanese women every year seems to argue that panic in the face of pressure is...inadvisable?

Women's health advocates fought a long and costly battle to push the health industry and the government into including the HPV vaccine in the regimen of standard vaccines provided free for minors. It is both saddening and entirely in character that the advisory panel has chosen to delegitimize the program at the first sign of trouble, on the entirely political and utterly unscientific excuse of "Well, we do not know what is going on, but to cover our behinds let us retreat to the position of being neither for nor against the vaccinations."

A Spot Perhaps Not So Sweet

I heard a version of Jesper Koll's Japan bull speech

(Link)

in December.

Here is my biggest problem with it.

At 4:34 in the video, Koll shows a graph of the wages and bonuses a typical salaried worker receives over his or her lifetime. Wages remain low over the first 15 years of work, then rise rapidly, reach a peak at around 55 years of age, whereupon they decline until retirement.

According to Koll, the passage of the "Mick Jagger" generation (Jagger was born in 1943) from its wage peak and into wage decline and retirement accounts for 80% of observed deflation. One has to assume he is talking about consumer prices deflation. He is clearly not talking about deflation in real estate -- that he accounts for differently. He does not even mention deflation in equities, an interesting choice given his day job.

According to Koll, the massive deflationary pressure from declining wages and bonuses will reverse as the children of the Mick Jagger generation enter their high wage post-40 years of age period.

Ummm, cannot say that I agree.

On the first of this month, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare released this graph.

Let us look first at the top solid line.

[Source]

In 1949, births topped out at a never-to-be-seen again 2,678,792. They fell precipitously, bottoming out at 1,566,713 in 1957 -- a 42% drop in just 12 years' time. Births recovered as the Mick Jagger generation began having children, peaking at 2,091,983 in 1973 (note - half of this generation have already entered the stage when their earnings accelerate). This new peak of births is 32% smaller than the 1949 peak.

After 1973, births fell slightly less precipitously than after 1949, hitting 1,431,577 in 1985 -- a 12 year fall of 32%. However, unlike in 1957, births have never recovered. Births have fallen slowly but steadily, declining 38% over the last 27 years, falling below the number of deaths (thick dotted line) in 2007.

So what does all this mean?

a) the numerically largest generation ever is leaving the workforce.

b) a numerically large generation is entering its high-wage period. However, their numbers are only around 75% of the generation whose total earning power they are supposed to be replacing.

c) there are dramatically fewer children and young people to serve as consumers and workers. Good for them on an individual level as they will (in theory!) be able to bid up wages and demand lower prices for goods. Bad for the country in terms of aggregate spending.

d) With births below replacement level, total population -- i.e., total consumption -- is going down and at an accelerating rate, the number of deaths over birth rising from 18,516 in 2007 to 210,000 last year.

Koll is probably right about a boom coming on. However, it is for the folks selling investments and savings vehicles to the echo generation. That generation has to plan for lifespans of 90 years and for taking care of elderly parents for two decades before falling themselves into decrepitude -- all with little help from whatever survives of the national pension system.

A surge in spending due to rising wages and bonuses?　The birth and death numbers do not offer solace.

And no no one in the Diet is losing much sleep over the implications of the above graph. To borrow a simile from Chris Rock, statistics and macro are like kryptonite to this blessed land's parliamentarians.

No Child Left Behind - The Latest Statistics On Daycare

Note: this is an expansion of comments originally left on The Japan Times' YenForLiving blog.

During the recent recent Annual Meeting in Tokyo, the IMF released a paper with the grandiloquent title "Can Women Save Japan (and Asia Too)?". I say grandiloquent because the paper is a scant four pages long, with the below as the first page (the bolding is my own; I have also fixed the typos):

"It is very difficult for women in Japan to balance raising children and working full-time," says Naomi Nakamura, a 35-yearold physical therapist from Yokohama who is now on maternity leave looking after her four-month-old baby girl. "Many companies do not allow shorter working hours, and even if they do, female employees are often reluctant to work part-time because of the atmosphere at work," explains Nakamura, who also has a three-year-old son.

For Nakamura, work, child rearing, and home are literally a balancing act. After her son was born, Nakamura was lucky to find a day care center near her job, but she still had a 20-minute bike ride to work with her son on the back. She tried to find an educational day care center for her son but, with none available, she had to put him in a center that provides only child care. She shopped for her groceries on her way home, putting the groceries in a basket at the front of her bike and her son in a seat on the back.

Like most Japanese fathers, Nakamura's husband works late every night, so she feeds
the children, bathes them, and puts them bed herself. She then cooks dinner for herself and her husband. They eat late at night and go to bed exhausted.

She struggled to find a child care center for her son and felt uncomfortable leaving the office early if the center called because he was sick. Before she went on maternity leave, her husband usually took their son to the center in the morning and she picked him up in the evening. But when her husband was on a business trip, which happened quite often, both tasks fell to Nakamura. "I feel very sorry for my colleagues who have to do extra work when I have to leave the office," she says.

Still, Nakamura feels lucky compared with her friends because her job skills are in demand. Many of her friends are being told they cannot have their old jobs back or are struggling to find part-time work because employers look askance at someone who may have to take leave to care for a sick child.

Nakamura's story is common to many women across Japan and in parts of Asia. their daily struggles balancing work and home are so daunting that many feel they have to choose between raising children and building a career.

This is a story of struggle? Nakamura Naomi of Yokohama could bicycle to work in 20 minutes? She sometimes had to take her son to childcare in the morning and pick him up in the evenings, though most of the time her husband would do the morning run?

This is not a story of struggle. For anyone who has lived in this blessed land for any period of time, this is a description of heaven.

As for the rest of the paper, it only barely escapes being so much intellectual kapok stuffing. One does learn one interesting fact:

Self-selection into non-career-track positions is another possible reason for the small number of women managers. this process appears to start early on, with gender ratios in top universities already showing divergence. At the University of Tokyo, for example, where entrance is based on test outcomes, less than 20 percent of the student body is female.

I admit surprise at the gender-skew at Todai, if indeed this is the latest ratio.

It is also good to have some IMF-certified numbers to toss out when one needs some talking points:

- "In Japan, the size of the working-age population, ages 15–64 is projected to fall from its peak of 87 million in 1995 to about 55 million in 2050—approximately the same size as the Japanese workforce at the end of World War II."

- "If, over the coming 20 years, Japan raised its female labor participation rate from 62 percent to 70 percent—that of its Group of Seven industrial countries (G7) compatriots excluding outlier Italy—then its per capita GDP would be approximately 5 percent higher."

["excluding outlier Italy" – oh, how that phrase must make Richard Samuels smile (Link)]

It is hard not to use the word fatuous when describing the paper, when this is the final paragraph:

If Nakamura lived in Sweden, she would have the support she needed to "have it all," and wouldn't think twice about going back to her previous job after maternity leave. Making it easier for women like Nakamura to stay in the workforce will make it easier for Japan to remain a player in the global economy. Making the most of Asia's women is an equitable progrowth strategy that makes good sense.

"If Nakamura lived in Sweden..." – leaves one breathless, does it not, the presumption?

Going back to Nakamura's so-called struggle with childcare, the government in late September released the figures on the nation's daycare centers (hoikuen) and pre-schools (yochien) as of April 1, 2012 (Link – J).

The key takeaways are:

- while the number of children being born is declining, the number of children at daycare or in pre-schools is growing at a rate of 3% per year. In between April 1, 2011 and April 1 of this year, the total number of children in daycare and childcare facilities increased by 55,851 to 2,176,802.

- while the number of children attending daycare or in pre-schools is growing fast, the number of children on waiting lists to get into childcare facilities is declining. The total number of children on waiting lists nationwide on April 1, 2012 was 24,825, less half of the year-on-year increase in the number of children attending day care or pre-school.

- in between April 1, 2011 and April 1, 2012, the total number of daycare centers and pre-schools increased by 326, to 23,711 – again, increasing despite a year-on-year decrease in the total number of eligible children

- 23 prefectures reported having fewer than 50 children on waiting lists; 11 had no children on waiting lists at all. The numbers for the previous year were 20 prefectures with fewer than 50 children on waiting lists and 9 prefectures with no children on waiting lists (Link - J)

- the Tokyo Metropolitan District, where most foreign journalists and researchers live, remains the outlier in terms of unmet demand, with 7,257 children on waiting lists — 29% of the national total. Even in the TMD, however, there was a year-on-year decline in the number of children waiting for inception, there being 7,855 on the waiting lists in April 2011.

- in Nakamura Naomi's home prefecture of Kanagawa, the prefecture with the third highest number of children on waiting lists after the TMD and Okinawa, the number of children on waiting lists plummeted, from 3,095 to 2,039, in between April 2011 and April 2012.

So in terms of access to childcare, Nakamura Naomi of Yokohama does not need to move to Sweden. It is moving to her.

Later - More sauce.

A more leisurely reading of the government's September 28 report reveals that Ms. Nakamura's Yokohama not only was the municipality with the largest increase in the number of children entering daycare or preschool (+2627 children from April 1, 2011 to April 1, 2012) but the also the municipality with the biggest drop in the number of children on waiting lists (-792, from 971 on April 1, 2011 to 179 this April).

By contrast, Osaka City -- which has a certain famous individual as its mayor -- was the municipality with the greatest increase of the number of children on waiting lists, from 396 on April 1, 2011 to 664 on April 1 this year.

Follow Up On Day Care Reform And Why We Should Care

I wrote a longish piece a while back on the government's plan to merge the nation's day care center system hoikuen with its kindergarten system yochien. I argued that reform of childcare want not a pressing issue, indeed it was unnecessary. I proposed that the merger was reform for reform's sake, the government feeling pressed to deliver on a change simply to show that it can.

There is now evidence that the major consumers of childcare have a strong antipathy to the government's plans. A Daichi Life Research Institute survey of the mothers with children attending yochien and hoikuen has found that both the mothers of both groups oppose the merger by a two-to-one margin. While the conventional wisdom holds that mothers with children in yochien, the system run by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport, Science and Technology, are the most afraid of the merger because of its possible degrading the education experience, while mothers with children in the hoikuen would support the measure from the added education content carried in with the merger, the survey found that no statistically significant differences in between the reportedd support/do not support levels of the two sets of mothers.

Do you support the proposed merger of hoikuen and yochien systems?

Yochien children's mothers

Support 25.9%
Oppose 48.9%

Hoikuen children's mothers

Support 24.1%
Oppose 47.8%

One could question the survey's methodology, which consisted of mailed responses from 247 mothers with children in yochien and 274 with children at hoikuen from 547 childcare facilities. It is impossible to determine until the research institute itself releases its report to what extent the respondents were self-selective and what effect that might have on results.

So why care about this arcane reform? Why not concentrate on the big, hard reforms in military export rules, the post office, the consumption tax?

Let me see...

1) Article 15 of the Constitution.

2) A persistent and pernicious faith of many in the economic and business media-academic circles is that Japan lacks sufficient childcare facilities for the country's women to be full participants in the nation's economy, limiting Japan's potential for growth. The truth is that outside Tokyo and Kanagawa, where most of the nation's news makers and analysts live, the country has sufficient childcare facilities.

If women's talents are not being fully exploited, it can be due to far more difficult to eradicate sexism in entry and promotion into career-track employment. It can be due to continued high rates of wanting to quit to work after marriage (J - Figure 7) -- despite expectations in and encouragement from their future husbands to continue working (J). The peculiarly high rate of wishing to quit work after marriage (I have seen figures showing indeed an increase of this percentage during the 1990s) may be due in part to the discovery that working in a corporate environment sucks, a reality captured in NTT Docomo's brilliant and bewildering new Shinjin no kimi e commercial.

Corporations would really want to know what their women employees wish for and expect.

3) When a government pursue reforms that are not of primary importance and which have only meager public support, the indication is that a congenital failure exists to focus on the important and pressing, with a preference (even when members of the government are aware of its failings) to ticking items off of lists.

The other possibility is the existence of powerful consituencies whose personal interests are being allowed to take precedence over the national interest. It is salient to find out just who is being served by these changes, that one might know the interests to which a party is beholden.

Of The DPJ And Children - Special Mother's Day Edition

In my post of yesterday, I remarked that "(t)ackling the birth dearth has been of tertiary interest for the DPJ leadership -- which has been expending far more of its political capital on solving the budget and pension gaps through raising the level of taxation or goosing economic growth rather than raising the number of taxpayers." (Link)

While this is true, one small caveat is in order. While the proposed rise in the consumption tax to 10% (part of the bill dump the Democratic Party of Japan unloaded on upon the Diet this week) is slated to be used primarily to put the fiscal houses of the pension, medical and eldercare systems in some sort of order, a slice will be reserved for programs to increase the birthrate. According to the May 11 print edition of the Tokyo Shimbun, if the raising of the tax rate to 10% nets the predicted 13.5 trillion extra yen for the government, then 700 billion -- 5.2% of the total -- will be set aside for programs supporting the birth and raising of children.

It is to be presumed that the extra revenues set aside for measures to raise the birthrate (shoshika taisaku) will in part restore cutbacks in aid for families with children (kodomo teate) the DPJ promised in its 2009 election manifesto -- aid that the DPJ first had to halve because of budgetary constraints, then cut further and reduced to a needs-based system (jido teate) largely indistinguishable from the jido teate system in place under LDP rule (in an fit of pettiness, the LDP and the New Komeito made their votes for the new truncated system contingent on the revival of the jido teate name).

However, no one knows for certain what the DPJ intends to do with the 700 billion, if that amount can even be raised. No bill is in the works. No plan has been announced. All we have to go on is Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko's response to a question posed to him on Thursday by DPJ member Izumi Kenta:

"Througth the Comprehensive Reform, investment in the future will be strengthened. [The Comprehensive Reform] has a goal of bringing into being a social safety net responding to the needs of all generations. As for the revenues raised through the consumption tax to be devoted to children and childrearing, I believe this means that social safety for life's first half will be strengthened." (Link - J)

Did you get that? Do not be alarmed: it was designed to baffle. Luckily for Noda, he was being questioned by a member of his own party. An opposition member would have snapped, "Excuse me, but what the blazes does your answer mean?"

The setting aside of a portion of the revenues raised by the elevated consumption tax for children and childrearing -- whatever the plan for those revenues might be -- is not the only fundamental reform the DPJ has proposed for government programs for children. In order to implement a reform I am not sure anyone asked for and I do not think anyone can explain, the government on Thursday presented to the Diet three bills that together will unify Japan's bifurcated pre-school childcare systems.

That Japan has two systems of childcare run by two different ministries may look odd but is eminently rational. The day care system (hoikuen) is run by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. It is focused on the "Labour" part of the ministry's mandate -- that is providing childcare for mothers who work. It takes in children as young as two months of age, looks after them from around 7:30 a.m. to 6:15 p.m. (actual operation hours vary according to the center and extended hours are available, for an extra fee).

The kindergarten system (yochien) is run by the Ministry of Education. It is a pre-school, primarily the children of mothers who do not work or who work only part-time. The hours are limited, with the children being taken in at around 9:00 am and let out in the middle of the afternoon. It takes in children once they are three years of age. Its nominal focus is on education, unsurprising given the ministry that runs it, which means preparing the children for the habitudes of elementary school.

Aside from the cost aspect of having two seperate bureaucracies running parallel systems, there is little if any impetus for having the two systems merge. There is a hope that having yochien keeping hoikuen hours will cut down on the backlog of children on waiting lists to get into hoikuen. However, since the staff backgrounds and physical layouts of hoikuen are very different from those of yochien, the unification will lead to a period of confusion as new staff are trained or old staff retrained and centers have to be retrofitted or rebuilt.

Besides, as page 9 of the most recent Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare report on day care centers shows, the problems of insufficient day care center spaces is a relatively small and extremely localized phenomenon. Only 25,556 children are on waiting lists to get into day care centers, a miniscule number compared the national population and to to the hundreds of thousands on the waiting lists in the 1990s, before the government went on a day care center opening binge. Furthermore, as the red dot shows, the problem of insufficient spaces is concentrated inside the Tokyo Metropolitan District, where 31% of the children on waiting lists live. Twenty-six of the 47 prefectures have fewer than 100 children on waiting lists.

Overturning the apple cart because the TMD is a hard place to build day care centers (here is one area where Richard Katz's great bugaboo, the imposition of the tax rate for on bare land on agricultural land located inside urban areas, would result in a net social good. Otherwise, the imposition of taxes would be an ecological and psychological disaster, the urban farms providing the only green spaces and open sky in many neighborhoods) seems, on the face of it, reckless beyond reckoning.

The systems, bifurcated as they are, largely work. There is a possibility, but no one has the statistics to back it up, that the conversion of the abbreviated day yochien to full-day hoikuen will encourage more women to take full time jobs. There is also a possibility -- but again without any statistical evidence -- that the education focus of the yochien will somehow improve the atmosphere of hoikuen, making them better at preparing children for school. Whether hoikuen children perform less well in school, all other factors being equal, than yochien children, remains unproven. Indeed, given that hoikuen children have been living much of their first six years of life in group settings with strict schedules and egalitarian values, they would just as likely to do better in school environments than children raised primarily by their mothers.

With that, a Happy Mother's Day to you all.


Later - Credit where credit is due: the Liberal Democratic Party, for all its faults and whatever its reasons, is opposed to the DPJ plan for a merger of the two public childcare systems -- which has all the appearances of a reform for reform's sake.

The X-Y Axes of Stupid: Children and Childcare

There days one wonders, "Oh, why fight it? Why not just sit back and be stupid, like seemingly nearly all those in positions of wealth, power and influence?"

Today is one of those days.

In a Children's Day (May 5) bit of thought-provoking whimsy, researchers at Tohoku University posted a Zero Hour time clock (J). Based upon the rate of decline in the number of children in between April of 2011 and April of 2012 -- the researchers provide the URLs of the relevant government populations statistics pages -- the clocks tick off both the number of children in Japan and the number of days until, if the decline in between April 2011 and April 2012 were extended indefinitely, there would be but a single child left in Japan.

The press release on the workings of the time clock (J) by team leader and Graduate School of Economics and Management Professor Yoshida Hiroshi explains that he copied his idea from the famous U.S. debt clock. He also makes clear that the purpose of the clock is to stimulate discussion of 1) what the current state of the decline in the number of children means, and 2) what are the consequences if declines continue in the future.

That the whole exercise is not an academic but a polemic exercise is apparent from the press release. It is a rush job, with typos. For instance, in the paragraph explaining the goals of the clock, the text should say "apiiru" not "piiru." There is no such word as "piiru."

Of course, the writers and editors news organizations would never, ever take this bit of fun and blow it up into an an actual scientific enterprise. Oh no, they would never do that:

3011 to see last child in Japan: population clock
Jiji, Kyodo

SENDAI — Japan will no longer have children under the age of 15 in 999 years, a group of researchers at Tohoku University Graduate School has estimated.

The team, led by professor Hiroshi Yoshida, developed a child population clock that displays an estimated number of children at any moment based on past percentages of decline. The clock was made available on the university's website Thursday.

The team used a 2011-2012 percentage change in the number of children that was released by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications on April 1. The number of children aged under 15 fell to 16.6 million in 2012 from 16.9 million in 2011.

The clock calculates the estimated number of children at present and counts down to the last child, based on the assumption that the number of children is expected to continue falling.

Japan's child population drops by one every 100 seconds, according to the clock. As a result, there will be no kids on May 18, 3011...

(Link)

AAAaaaaarggghhhhh!

Of course, this version of the story has gone both viral and mainstream, at least among the publications assuming their readership have sub-bonobo IQ (and if any of readers out there are 100% bonobos, please accept my apologies for associating you with these organizations).

(Search results)

Now this is not to say that the decline of the birthrate has not been one of the social policy areas where the government, both under Liberal Democratic Party and Democratic Party of Japan leadership, has run up against a brick wall. The LDP in the 1990s went on a day care center-building binge that continues to this day -- the green line in Figure 1 of this 2011 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare report.

[By the way, check out the map on page 9 of the report. It shows that of all the children awaiting placement in day care centers, 31% live in the Tokyo Metropolitan District. Add in Kanagawa Prefecture, and percentage rises to 43%. And nine prefectures have zero children on waiting lists.

Can we please now decently bury the "Japan lacks sufficient childcare for working mothers" canard?]

As for the DPJ, it promised, though it in the end has not been able to deliver, direct financial support to all families with children. The child allowance (kodomo teate) was potentially good social policy, as it certainly would have made it possible for lower and middle income couples to have children earlier and in greater numbers. However, the DPJ simultaneously sold the child allowance as an economic stimulus measure, which was dumb, as families, even though receiving only half of the monthly payments promised, still managed to save half the amount dispensed. Of course, financial planners writing in women's magazines advised readers to put all the child allowance into savings.

[If we are to take Shakespeare as our guide (E), the agenda for the DPJ should have been: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the financial planners."]

Tackling the birth dearth has been of tertiary interest for the DPJ leadership -- which has been expending far more of its political capital on solving the budget and pension gaps through raising the level of taxation or goosing economic growth rather than raising the number of taxpayers. Indeed, the "measures for for the declining birthrate" portfolio has become the hot potato of cabinet jobs. A humiliating nine different ministers have held the portfolio since a DPJ-led coalition took power in September 2009 (J) -- a rate of turnover neared only by the hard right dream portfolio of Minister for the DPRK Abductees Issue (six different ministers since the takeover).

Despite failure of the government to find a game plan for reversing the decline in the birthrate, the Japanese people -- whatever that means in genotype terms -- is not going extinct. The Japanese language might go extinct* -- look at at the state of Manchu one century after the fall of the Qing Dynasty. However, writing about the Japanese people going extinct based on the extrapolation of the rate of decline between April 2011 and April 2012 -- not a particular cheerful and hope-filled year, if one may say so -- that deserves a spanking.

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* Mori Arinori (E) thought it a potentially worthwhile goal -- just one of the brainstorms that got folks angry enough to kill him on the morning of Constitution Day in 1889.

Missed Something Here

Those in the know, whoever you are, could you explain when koi became, in the words of Yuri Kageyama of AP:

Thousands of Japanese marched to celebrate the switching off of the last of their nation's 50 nuclear reactors Saturday, waving banners shaped as giant fish that have become a potent anti-nuclear symbol.

(Link)

Except for the coincidental occurrence of the shutdown of the Tomari #3 reactor on the Tango no Sekku holiday, is there some other reason heretofore not widely stated for carp streamers or the giant images of any other fish being "potent anti-nuclear" symbols? Please let me know in comments.

Furthermore, is it not a wee bit misleading to refer to a crowd of 5,500 in Tokyo as "thousands of Japanese"? A crowd of 5,500 is less than five Odakyu express trains pulling into Shinjuku.

By the way, this week's heavy rains wiped out the display of Japan's largest koi nobori (J), trimmed parades and eliminated numerous scheduled outdoor celebrations of spring (J) -- as well as a hacking out an unhealthy chunk of the seasonal revenues of major tourist sites.


Later - Here are some anti-nuclear protest/celebration crowd figures from other major cities:

Sapporo: 450
Nagoya: 250
Osaka: 600
Fukuoka: 50

At The Frontiers Of Human Possibility

While much of television programming geared toward entertaining children is disturbing (what is with the NHK morning show where the main characters are a chair whose lips do not move and a tall, dancing, talking saguaro cactus?) there is one segment in one of the morning shows that gives me the shivers. The segment is called "Otetsudai robo" ("The Helper Robot") which encourages children to think of themselves as helpful household robots. The first part is an animated section where the child, as a heroic, flying character, helps out his mother and father, earning their gratitude and affection. The second half is a live segment where the human/robot -- sometimes a child, sometimes a parent, sometimes a grandparent -- responds to a command sent from a box with a series of buttons from the "a, i, u, e, o" order of kana.

I wish I did not have an inkling of what the producers of the show are trying to tell me here. If it is that the relations between humans are bettered when one side is a robot responding mechanically to the orders of another -- they should be reassured that I and probably the children are getting that message.

This is a terrible message to be sending to small children.

Of course, I could, due to my upbringing, be failing to see the cute, acceptable side of defining ideal human relations in such a peculiar fashion. After all, this is the country of Astro Boy (Tetsuwan no Atomu), the extremely humanoid robot boy (powered by atomic energy, in a nice, desensitizing nod to the nuclear power industry) who is not just a boy and a robot but cute and brave and strong. What a role model!

However, the interchangeability of the human with the humanoid, where the humanoid is not manufacturable using current technology, leads to a breakdown somewhat in the ability of children to discriminate what is real and what is not. In the lastest annual survey of Kuraray, a manufacturer of the ubiquitous landoseru -- the anachronistic leather backpacks all elementary school students are required to buy -- the fourth most popular answer to question of "What do you want to be when you when you grow up?" when it is put to 6 year-old boys is "Television/Anime Character."

I can foresee the conversation:

"Son...about your answer to the survey. I am afraid that when you grown up you cannot become an animation character. Sorry."

The really odd thing about the Kuraray survey is that the parents have input into the process, as the survey results are based on postcards filled out and sent in to the company. There is a special section for the parents to write down what their dreams are for their children (and yes, the answers in that section are very interesting). So it is not as if the children are slipping off, confessing to the company their secret wish that they were alive in only two dimensions, not three. (Link - J)

The Kuraray survey is of course a goldmine for marketers, which can gear their advertising to fit the most prominent current life goals of children. Furthermore, it recounts the dreams of 6 year-olds, which cannot be criticized too much for reflecting their consumption of hours and hours of television broadcasts.

Then again, if one could not believe that when you grow up you could be an anime character, then we might not have Wrecking Crew Orchestra taking dance performance to now-world famous and previously unimagined technical limits (You Tube).