PACIFIC PERSPECTIVE : Japan’s Hard Sell: Motherhood : As the birthrate drops, talk arises about encouraging women to forgo higher education and marry earlier.

The powerful planners of Japan’s economic miracle have just discovered that their nation’s birthrate plummeted to an all-time low of 1.57 during 1989, and--averse to importing foreign workers--they are deeply worried about what their population decline may mean for future economic growth.

In a recent high-level government meeting, Finance Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto suggested that Japanese women were having fewer children because they were too well-educated. The implication was that they should be discouraged (or prevented) from attending college. One wonders what his next proposal will be: Medals and bonuses for “hero mothers” as in Nazi Germany? Or Draconian laws against abortions and contraceptives, as in Ceausescu’s Romania?

I am not disputing the finance minister’s observation that highly educated women usually have fewer children than poorly educated ones. It is also true that urbanized, middle-class women have fewer children than rural women, and that industrialization in general brings with it a decline in a nation’s birthrate.

These things are so well-known that many nations today are trying to reverse the equation by reducing their birthrate--either by educating or forcing (if necessary) couples to bear fewer children--so that the economic climate will improve. These are nations where the current population growth rate threatens to overwhelm potential development. Thus the Chinese government has tried to mandate the one-child family, and the Indian government at one time wanted to perform vasectomies on all men who had fathered three living children. But just as it is not easy to change the proclivities of peasants, who see another child as a form of old-age insurance or as an extra field hand, so it is not easy to persuade a modern, well-educated couple to have more than one or two children.

To begin with, raising children in a highly industrialized country like Japan is expensive. There are school fees, computers, sports equipment, special classes, even cars to pay for. Responsible parents who want to see their children well-educated and well-launched into the middle class cannot afford to do it very often.

The customary retirement age--as early as 55 in some sectors--also may contribute to reducing a family’s size. Japanese are now marrying in their mid-to-late 20s and having their first child when the husband is perhaps in his early 30s; that child may still be in college when his or her father retires. Once they turn 40, few Japanese men are eager to expand their families.

The high cost of living also has an impact on mothers, many of whom return to part-time work when their children reach school age precisely in order to buy for them the advantages a single income may not be sufficient to provide: the “cram school,” the piano lessons, the travel abroad, the lavish wedding and honeymoon.

If Minister Hashimoto is serious about Japanese couples producing more children, he should also anticipate that these children will be less well-educated and provided for than the current crop.

The second drawback I see to increasing Japan’s birthrate is that the country is, by everyone’s admission, already very densely populated. As people become more affluent, crowded trains, cramped housing, and choked freeways become a disincentive to having large families. Perhaps the government should try promising young couples a low-cost four-bedroom house within easy commuting distance of the husband’s work in exchange for their agreeing to have four children. This might be more successful in raising the birthrate than discouraging young women from obtaining college educations.

Japan already places an unnecessary burden on its women by restricting contraceptive methods to the condom and abortion. The first method places birth control in the hands of men (even though it is often the wife who buys the condoms.) And abortion surely is a method of last resort. Abortion, it seems to me, should be available to women when other birth control methods have failed. But it should not be a method of first choice, or one that a woman must turn to repeatedly.

Why are other methods of birth control not more widely used in Japan? The pill, the diaphragm, the IUD, tubal ligation--these are all common in many societies. I have heard many explanations for Japan’s attitude, ranging from the belief that the birth-control pill is unsafe to the fact that abortions are very lucrative for physicians.

I believe that the chief underlying reason is cultural: that to allow other methods would give women too much control over their own lives.

Japan is still a male-dominated, male-chauvinist society. Hashimoto’s remarks about the declining birthrate make this all too clear. He seems to view the production of children as somewhat akin to industrial productivity.

If companies can raise their output by haranguing workers and getting them to work overtime, then why not get women to produce more children by cutting short their time in school and lowering the marriage age? This assumes, of course, that wives, like factory workers, will unquestioningly follow the boss’ orders.

I deplore this attitude toward Japan’s declining birthrate because of what it reveals about Japanese male attitudes toward women. But I deplore even more strongly this nationalistic approach toward the birthrate. The world as a whole is already grossly overpopulated,and it is estimated that the current population of more than 5 billion will double by the middle of the next century before it levels off or starts to decline.

I find it difficult to imagine what a world with twice as many people in it as today will look like. Will there be no more trees because they will all have been cut down in the search for arable land and the growth of cities? And if there are no more trees, what will happen to the air we breathe? To the birds?

It strikes me as utter parochial nonsense to view population growth in anything other than a global framework. The world needs fewer people, and if the Japanese are currently reproducing themselves below replacement levels, they ought to be proud of that fact, and the United Nations or the Nobel committee ought to award them a special medal.