When will people realize diversity for diversity’s sake is a failure?
When threatened by soaring oil prices in the 1970s, Japan’s response was swift, smart and successful.
It transformed itself into the most efficient user of energy in the developed world, thanks to government leadership, engineering skill and a public that embraced conservation.
Now Japan faces a much more fundamental threat to its future — demographic decline that experts say will delete 70 percent of its workforce by 2050.
Yet the all-hands-on-deck response that quelled the oil shock is conspicuously missing from Japan’s policies for a disappearing population.
“Unfortunately, the people do not share a sense of crisis,” said Masakazu Toyoda, a vice minister at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. “Yes, we deserve some kind of criticism.”
In recent months, however, the government’s tone has changed substantially, as powerful politicians and business leaders have begun to call for enlightened government intervention that would ease the cost and complications of raising children.
“We need to organize our society so that women and families will be able to raise children while working,” Fukuda said in the interview.
To that end, the government is working on a bill to require companies to offer shorter hours to parents with young children and to stop requiring them to work overtime.
Still, Fukuda’s government is not proposing a major new increase in spending on national child care, in part because it does not have the money.
Japan struggles to pay the pension and health-care costs of the world’s oldest population. It also has a debt burden that amounts to 180 percent of its gross domestic product, which is the highest ever recorded by a developed country.
Government spending on child care here amounts to a quarter of what is spent in France and Sweden, where comprehensive family policies have increased the birthrate and kept women at work.
“I think we still lack adequate efforts on that front,” Fukuda said.
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