Daycare shortage | 待機児童

“What the hell, Japan?”

Don’t give me this crap about “a society where all citizens are dynamically engaged.”

In February 2016, an outraged mother wrote an anonymous blog post that soon spread across social media, garnering 50,000 likes on Facebook.

Yesterday we got a wonderful rejection from daycare.

How the hell am I supposed to be “dynamically engaged” now?

I give birth, raise children, go out and work in society, pay taxes — what part of that are you dissatisfied with, Japan?

All this talk of a “falling birthrate” is bullshit.

You say it’s great to have children, but it’s near impossible to put them in a daycare — who the hell do you think is gonna do that?

I don’t care if you have an affair or take bribes, just open more daycares.

You’re spending billions on the Olympics.

I don’t give a shit about the Olympic emblem, just open more daycares.

If you’ve got enough cash to pay some fancy designer, open more daycares.

Now what am I supposed to do? I’ll probably have to quit my job.

What the fuck, Japan?

If you can’t open more daycares, then give me a ¥200,000 child allowance.

“We can’t create more daycares and can only afford to pay you a few thousand yen, but we really want to do something about this childbirth problem!” — you want to have your cake and eat it, too, huh, you old dote?

If the country doesn’t help us have children, what are you going to do?

There are loads of people who say they’d have kids if only they had money, so hurry up and give us money or make all the costs of raising children free.

I’m sure you can find enough money — if you just fired all the guys in the Diet (parliament) who are having affairs, taking bribes, or sitting around twiddling their thumbs, you could cut the place in half!

Get your shit together, Japan.

Each spring, thousands of working parents in cities across Japan are told that there is no space for their children in public daycares.

The daycare shortage is most severe in and around Tokyo, where the ratio of working mothers is highest and many parents do not have the support network afforded by extended family. Meguro, Suginami, and Setagaya wards had twice as many applicants as available slots for 2016, and in Tokyo’s 23 wards as a whole, 65,063 children applied for 42,897 available slots. Tokyo’s birthrate of just 1.15 children per women is the lowest in Japan and well below the national average of 1.46, making the capital the black hole at the center of Japan’s demographic implosion.

My friend Kohei is a 34-year-old father whose wife also works full-time, one of the many families for whom two incomes (共働き) is a matter of economic survival and ¥50,000/month private daycare is not an option. Their 4-year-old daughter was put on the daycare waiting list several years ago. Kohei says that if they hadn’t received special permission to enroll in the childcare at the hospital where his wife works, “it is scary to think about what we would have done. One of us probably would have had to stay home to watch our daughter. Because Japan is still nowhere near gender equality, in most cases that means the woman who earns less quits.”

Municipalities award limited seats according to a points system: families with two working parents are prioritized over one-working-parent families, and points are added for each year a child has been on the waiting list, so most children are able to enroll after waiting a year or two.

Kohei was still a graduate student when they applied for his daughter, so they missed the cutoff. This year, they applied for his newborn son, but were rejected again despite both being employed. A city employee told them that many families with two working parents were rejected this year — apparently parents who have worked at least five years at the same company get priority — but by a rare stroke of luck, a spot opened up in May.

There is one group that receives top priority for daycare: single parents. Kohei told me, “It may be hard to believe, but there are stories of people getting a ‘paper divorce’ in order to win a daycare spot. Without my wife’s workplace as a backup I think we might have divorced, if that meant we could get a spot and not quit our jobs.”

Despite sunny talk of “Womenomics” and constant handwringing over the declining birthrate as an existential national crisis, working women have struggled to get their voice heard in Japan’s overwhelmingly male Diet, where just 9.5% of lower house members are female (157th in the world) and budgets allocate far less money for families than the OECD average. When an opposition politician read out portions of the outraged mother’s blog post in the Diet in March, she was met with jeers demanding she “have a real debate,” and “reveal the author.” In 2014, a female member of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly was on the floor calling for greater government support for women who want to have children when male lawmakers taunted her with shouts of “Why don’t you get married first!” and “What’s the matter with you, are you barren?”

Amid outrage over the continued daycare shortage this year, the government announced “emergency measures” asking municipalities to expand class size from 19 to 22 children, but deregulation may have reached its limits — substantial reforms introduced in 2015 have not solved the shortage.

The main problem is the low pay and long hours of daycare teachers, who receive on average ¥220,000 per month ($2,000), ¥110,000 less than the average income. New facilities often struggle to recruit staff, despite 800,000 people with proper accreditation who are not working in the field. In that sense, the daycare shortage is emblematic of a larger problem: so long as labor performed by women and care workers remains undervalued, Japan is unlikely to see a dramatic improvement in its low birthrate.