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The town of Nagi in Okayama prefecture is bucking the trend; they have many families with 3-4 children, and their overall birth rate is well over replacement le
by blisterpeanuts 3y ago
The town of Nagi in Okayama prefecture is bucking the trend; they have many families with 3-4 children, and their overall birth rate is well over replacement levels.[1]
They get delegations from all over Japan as well as Korea, eager to learn how they did it. So many visitors, in fact, that they've started charging a fee, to keep from being swamped.
As far as I can tell, it comes down to money. About 20 years ago they decided to incentivize families in various ways, and this combined with a fairly stable local economy has paid off.
It's not clear whether their success can be replicated nationally, but at least the problem is now widely recognized and discussed at the highest level, so perhaps they'll be able to slow down the trend at least, if not reverse it.
1. https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2023-08-16/japan-miracle-town-birth-rate-depopulation-crisis https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2023-08-16/japan-...
- rnk 3y agoThere's not a magic thing, but you have a sequence of things that need to be addressed. Inexpensive young child care, less expensive schools, time off from your job without penalty to encourage having kids, make it triply so for women. Give a career boost for having kids. It's money and cultural and they're not changing their culture! It's really hard to change culture, look at the US, we turned out to have a significant racist underbelly after all, it never went away.