Sophia Magazine vol.4 / WINTER 2016

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dren due to women’s internalized desire to focus exclusively on childcare once they become mothers.”Views on family and marriage naturally vary among coun-tries and regions, and these perspectives have a significant impact on each society’s falling birthrate. For this reason, while various countries share this phenomenon in common, barriers exist that may prevent countries from learning from another country’s policy response.“For example, we have data in Japan that environmental conditions conducive to intergenerational cooperation, such as tri-generational housing and grown children living near their parents, lead to a higher birthrate,” Professor Tabuchi says. “However, it’s not easy to create policy that incorporates that finding, let alone provide useful input for North Ameri-can and Western European societies, which tend to be far more strongly entrenched toward the nuclear family.”Yet, Professor Tabuchi believes that those regions within Japan that have the lowest birthrates and oldest populations — what some might call the most acute of the acute cases — may actually have something that merits a closer look by the rest of the world.“An area depopulates, leaving only the elderly behind. It’s critical not to see this situation solely in terms of the nega-tives,” cautions Professor Tabuchi, “but to observe and hy-pothesize about — in terms of the positives — the factors that make members of this demographic want to continue living there, even if it means being apart from family.”What he focuses on is social capital, powered by interper-sonal connections forged by the community through its his-tory and traditions. This also relates, in turn, to the problem of how regional communities should apprehend and support the changing idea of “family,” whether addressing the rise of the nuclear family or the growing isolation of the individual.Recent years have been marked by cases in which a regional community managed to put the brakes on depopulation, re-invigorated by growing migration from metropolitan areas of returning locals and new residents. According to Profes-sor Tabuchi, this is not simply the result of relocation policy. Rather, it indicates that the region is equipped with a kind of inclusion mechanism for new arrivals.“Not a few of these places still retain a culture where chil-dren are cared for and raised by the community as a whole. There’s a natural state of intergenerational cooperation that goes beyond blood ties, and this serves simultaneously as a safety net for the elderly.”Among the problems most countries will face in the coming decades is the decline of regional cities and communities. The aforementioned characteristic of inclusiveness in Japanese communities provides a ray of hope.According to the World Health Organization’s World Health Statistics 2016, the average lifespan in Japan in 2015 was 83.7 years, the highest in the world. On the other hand, according to the World Bank’s newest data (2013), Japan’s birthrate of 8.2 per 1,000 was the lowest among the 200 countries and regions surveyed. “While the birthrate is trending upward since hitting bot-tom in 2005, the situation is far from favorable,” Professor Rokuro Tabuchi says. “There’s been no change to the fact that Japan leads the world in low birthrate and aging trends.”Why has the problem become so acute in Japan?Professor Tabuchi points out that a particular ideal of the family was created during the postwar economic boom, and the entrenchment of this ideal is the sociological backdrop to the problem.“Most Japanese, the younger generation included, are still not free of a very particular idea of what a family should look like — a husband who draws enough income to support a family, and a wife who focuses on housework and childcare. This is why men with low income are less likely to be chosen as life partners, for example, and that, in turn, becomes a fac-tor in the larger trends toward later marriage and the decline in marriage. And working women are reluctant to have chil-The Spell of the Ideal Family“Capital” Possessed by Japanese Communities14Research

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