Outcry in Japan. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has come under fire after his party suggested student debt relief for those who have children in an attempt to stem the fall in the birth rate in the Japanese archipelago. At the start of the year, he promised “unprecedented” measures to combat the declining birth rate in Japan, a chronic problem that is becoming more and more acute.
Humans ‘treated like cattle’
Fumio Kishida’s political formation, the Liberal Democratic Party (PLD, conservative right), is working on various proposals on the subject, which must be presented to the government by the end of March according to local media. But one of these proposals, conditioning the reduction of student debt on parenthood, has raised a wave of criticism.
“Demanding a child in return for a reduction in student debt is a bad measure to tackle the low birth rate,” said Senator Noriko Ishigaki on Friday during a debate in the Upper House of the Japanese Parliament in the presence of the Prime Minister. Fumio Kishida spoke little about the content of the proposal, preferring to insist on the need to “respect” a “free and vigorous” debate on the subject. Critics also fused on Twitter: “It’s like saying ‘Pay with your body'”, indignantly a user of the social network, while another considered that the measures of the PLD amounted to “treating humans like cattle “.
Low number of births
Masahiko Shibayama, the PLD MP heading the committee working on this file, assured Japanese media that this measure was intended to financially support families, and not to sanction childless homes. “We are discussing this as an extension of support for raising children, rather than a policy related to the birth rate,” he told TV Asahi.
In January, Fumio Kishida estimated that Japan found itself “at the limit of the inability to continue to function as a society” because of the drop in births in the country. Nearly 30% of Japan’s 125 million inhabitants are aged 65 and over, a world record after Monaco. And the number of births in the country fell in 2022 below the 800,000 mark, a new low since these statistics began in 1899 and almost half as many as 40 years ago, according to government figures published at the end of FEBRUARY.