Japanese Couples Think Pink

Baby boys are not wanted here--statistically speaking, at least.

In a stunning repudiation of the traditional Asian values that for centuries have put a premium on producing male heirs, surveys show that up to 75% of young Japanese parents now prefer baby girls.

Daughters are seen as cuter, easier to handle, more emotionally accessible and, ever more important in this fast-aging society, more likely to look after their elderly parents.

Plenty of Japanese are dubious about whether the current crop of female infants will grow up to fulfill such parental hopes. Nevertheless, a passion for baby girls has spawned hot-selling books and magazines, pricey new personalized advice services for sex selection, and clinics dispensing suppository jelly--pink to help produce girls or green for boys--for would-be parents trying to conceive the child of their dreams.

“Boys don’t listen and are harder to raise,” said Yumi Yamaguchi, 27. To improve her odds of conceiving a girl, Yamaguchi scrupulously followed the advice in a popular sex-selection book and took her temperature for an entire year before trying to become pregnant. She sobbed with joy when daughter Ami was born 14 months ago.

“Boys and their mothers seem to have a weak bond, but mothers and daughters stay close all of their lives,” she said.

Yamaguchi lives in a tiny, two-room apartment in Isehara, 30 miles southwest of Tokyo. Her husband and his family run a lumber company. Twenty years ago, such couples usually hoped for a boy to carry on the family business and were likely to keep trying until they got one.

But Yamaguchi says she and her husband can’t afford a second child, and even if their economic prospects improve, they will try for another girl.

Dr. Shiro Sugiyama, chairman of the Sex Selection Study Assn. of Japan, which has 800 obstetricians as members, estimates that only 2% of Japanese women seeking to conceive are taking measures to select the baby’s gender. Only their thermometers know for sure how many women are really trying, because many, like Yamaguchi, do not consult doctors on the subject.

So far, there has been no measurable change in the sex ratio of Japanese newborns.

That may be explained in part by the fact that sex-selective abortion is unheard of in Japan, doctors and sociologists say. Though abortion is legal until the 22nd week of pregnancy, the Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology forbids its doctors to reveal the gender of a baby before then, because of concerns about gender-targeted abortions.

In boy-crazy China, South Korea and Taiwan, abortions of female fetuses--particularly in families that already have one girl--are blamed for creating a large surplus of males, a population imbalance that could prove socially destabilizing when the boys grow up to find that there are not enough girls to marry.

In China, there now are 118 boys per 100 girls under age 5. In South Korea, despite the introduction of harsh penalties for doctors caught performing prenatal gender screenings, by 1990 there were 117 male births per 100 female, and a recent study estimated that about 30,000 female fetuses were aborted that year. Statistics suggest that half of all female fetuses conceived in families that already had two children were aborted. In Taiwan, the ratio of boys to girls in 1990 was 110 to 100.

In Japan, however, 105.4 boys were born last year for every 100 girls, a ratio statistically unchanged since 1899 and matching the global norm.

The question that concerns demographers is whether and how fast that rate could change as Japan’s anemic birthrates fall further and the technology for selecting a baby’s gender--though far from foolproof--grows more reliable, cheaper and, to many people, less morally troubling than abortion.

Sugiyama, whose how-to books on sex selection have sold more than 465,000 copies in the past six years, claims that his method is about 80% effective. It is based on such low-tech techniques as charting the ovulation cycle using body temperature, as well as the use of a pH-altering jelly that favors survival of the sperm of choice.

His warm and cheerful clinic dispensed 50 vials of jelly last month at $100 apiece. Ten years ago, about 80% of the patients who were interested in choosing their babies’ gender wanted boys. Now, 80% want girls.

“If it’s the second or third child, it seems they all want girls,” reported Dr. Rikikazu Sugiyama, the founder’s grandson. Now, he said, an increasing number of parents are seeking to select the sex of their firstborn.

Though Japan’s inheritance laws no longer favor sons over daughters, and failure to produce a male heir is no longer grounds for divorce, pressure to bear sons--especially in rural areas--has not vanished altogether, said another doctor at the clinic, Satoshi Ienaga. He said some women who have one or more girls still cite a traditional proverb, “A bride who doesn’t have a son finds her position is weak,” to explain why they want help conceiving a boy.

Still, the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research in Tokyo has systematically documented the growing preference for girls by asking the same questions of married couples every five years. In 1982, the survey found that of those families who wanted only one child, 51.5% wanted a boy. But by 1987, only 37.1% wanted a boy, and by 1997 it was just 25%.

The vast majority of couples said they wanted two children, a boy and a girl, virtually unchanged since 1982. But the number of families who wanted no boys and two girls had jumped to 13% from 8.9% in 1982. Only 2.1% of couples said they wanted two boys.

The predilection for daughters is strongest in Japanese women, other studies confirm. A majority of Japanese men still prefer to have a boy if they have only one child, but most men want one child of each sex. This leads some observers to conclude that the women’s yen for girls may not translate into more female births, since many men may not cooperate--in the bedroom or the doctor’s office--with the sex-selection regimen chosen by their wives.

Whether or not the girl craze produces more females, experts say it is noteworthy as an indicator of profound social change that includes a national pension system that makes male offspring less essential in financially supporting their elderly parents, a weakening of the ancestral male-dominated family system, increasing individualism and the much-improved socioeconomic status of women.

But some people say more parents want girls because life is no longer sweet for Japanese boys. To hear them tell it, hapless male tots are condemned to endure the take-no-prisoners Japanese educational system, followed by a life sentence as a faceless drone for Japan Inc.

“It’s tough to be a man,” Yukiko Nakayama, deputy editor of My Baby magazine, said with a laugh. “Even when they are little, boys have to compete. If they are bad at sports, it’s a problem; if they are bad in school, it’s a problem. They have to get into a good university and get a good job. There’s a lot more pressure on them.

“Life is easier for girls,” concluded the editor, who is the mother of a son and a daughter. “They have more choices.”

Thus, some young Japanese women feel daunted by the rigors of rearing a successful male, Nakayama said. “Their fathers are not good role models, their husbands are bad role models, and they do not know how to raise their sons. So they may prefer to have daughters.”

And although Japanese society may give more choices to its daughters, expectations for sons have not been liberated.

“Mothers feel pressure to raise these boys as they always did: ‘Become a good man,’ ” Nakayama said. “Of course, these pressures existed in the past, but then men had special privileges. Now the privileges are gone, but they still have all the responsibilities.”

However tarnished their cachet or prospects, Japanese baby boys are not likely to be outnumbered by girls in the near future, if ever, said Dr. Kenji Hayashi of Japan’s National Institute for Public Health.

Natsumi Aratame, a U.S.-trained demographer and sociologist at Shikoku Gakuin University who is the father of two easy-to-raise girls, agreed that the threat remains theoretical, since most Japanese families still want one boy and one girl.

Still, Aratame said, “judging from what I hear, it seems people are pursuing more active methods rather than passive methods. That worries me as a demographer. People are just fulfilling their personal interests, but this will be quite against social interests.”

Meanwhile, Japan is only beginning to grapple with the ethical issues raised by the emerging sex-selection technology. So far, the reaction of the medical establishment is “go slow.”

In 1994, the powerful obstetrics society, citing safety concerns, issued an edict against using the most potent new sex-selection technique, which involves separating sperm containing the heavier X chromosomes, which produce girls, from that bearing the lighter Y chromosomes, which produce boys. Artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization can follow. (In the U.S., a similar technique, called Microsort, also is being used experimentally for sex selection.)

The head of the obstetrics society’s ethics committee, Dr. Seichiro Fujimoto, said the organization’s decision that sperm separation should not be used for sex selection is based on both safety concerns and ethical objections.

“The general feeling is that it goes against God’s logic,” Fujimoto said in a telephone interview from Hokkaido University Hospital. “The silent majority, most Japanese, would be against it.”

However, Fujimoto conceded that this traditional view of nature and ethics holds less sway among the younger generation. Yumi Yamaguchi, the 27-year-old mother, said the authorities should mind their own business. If parents did not have to gamble on their baby’s sex, she said, they might decide to have more children--something the government desire “They should leave it up to individuals to decide such things,” she said with exasperation as she crawled across her apartment’s tatami mats mopping up a trail of Ami’s spilled juice. “It’s about to be the 21st century, after all.”