Stress Dims Dreams of a Second Child

Spend a day with Sachie and Shoji Takamori and it’s easy to see why they have not had the second child they yearn for.

When Sachie, a 29-year-old piano teacher, scrambles out of bed at 7:30 a.m., steam is already rising from their preprogrammed rice cooker. She runs for the kitchen to fry up fish and vegetables for her husband’s lunch box.

Shoji, 28, a used car salesman for troubled Mitsubishi Motors, sleeps until the last moment before squirming into his gray uniform. He takes the lunch box and grabs the garbage on his way out the door.

By 8:05, usually before their 3-year-old son, Ryo, wakes up, Shoji is gone. He probably won’t be home until after 10 o’clock tonight. But for mother and child, the daily scramble of work and family obligations is just beginning.

The Takamoris believe that the ideal number of children is three. Yet many young Japanese couples are too strained today and too anxious about tomorrow to have a larger family.

The causes of a falling birthrate have shifted since the boom decades that followed World War II, when improved living standards and women’s education led to a decrease in family size in Japan and throughout the industrialized world.

Now, unfavorable demographics and the advent of a second decade of economic stagnation have sucked Japan into a vicious circle of public pessimism.

It’s not only finances that discourage young people from having children, but also the daunting logistics of life: small houses, long commutes, a Darwinian education system and the distinctly family-unfriendly culture of the Japanese workplace.

Shoji has Wednesdays off; Sachie has Sundays. They rarely share a meal, and their last date without Ryo was one afternoon on their anniversary a year ago. Sachie complains that the only time they can talk is during the family bath--if Ryo isn’t being cranky.

Japan’s economic frailty means that Shoji no longer has lifelong job security. The couple need Sachie’s income. But in their rural town in western Japan, there isn’t any child care in the evenings, when piano teachers are in demand.

The Japanese birthrate dropped below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman in 1974. For more than two decades, the government has been predicting a turnaround. Instead, fertility keeps plunging. The economic slump has depressed births further. In trend-setting Tokyo in 1999, the birthrate fell to a record low of just 1.06 babies per woman.

Last year, there was a small uptick in births and marriages, which was attributed to millennium fever. The extra 12,891 babies nudged the national birth rate up to 1.35 from a record-low 1.34 in 1999, according to statistics released last week by the Health Ministry. But officials said the increase was probably a one-year fluke and predicted that births will continue to decline.

Still, Japanese are hopeful that public excitement over the long-awaited pregnancy of Crown Princess Masako will inspire other young couples.

The chronically low birthrate is usually blamed on young people postponing marriage. But married couples also are delaying, then deciding that they’re too old or finding that they’re unable to conceive. Sachie believes in having children before age 30 or calling it quits.

Shoji would be happy to take on more child-care duties, but his long hours make that impossible. After he leaves, Sachie finishes making Ryo’s breakfast, feeds him and patiently stuffs the octopus-like limbs that keep poking out from his clothing back into the appropriate holes.

To save money, Sachie hauled warm water from the tub last night to fill the washing machine. Now she hangs the laundry to dry. The Takamoris have two cars, two mobile phones and a new home big enough for her parents to move into when they can no longer take care of themselves. But electricity is so expensive that, like most Japanese, they don’t own a clothes dryer.

Japan’s Shinto tradition stresses purification, and standards of cleanliness have not dropped since women entered the work force. Many women wash every family member’s bath towel and pajamas every day.

At 9 a.m., sighing that she still hasn’t done any cleaning, Sachie straps Ryo into their Mitsubishi minivan for the 20-minute drive to her childhood home, where her paternal grandmother, parents and unmarried younger sister live.

It was mainly thanks to her grandfather that Sachie was able to return to her music career after Ryo’s birth. Yoshio Yazaki died last winter at the age of 85, but until he fell ill a year ago, he did most of the family shopping and folded the laundry. His wife, Fumie, 83, has trouble with her legs, so it was Yoshio who mainly baby-sat--and doted on--his great-grandson.

Sachie now depends on her mother, 52-year-old Chizuko, for child care. In return, she tries to lessen her hard-working mother’s load.

She arrives at her parents’ home, cleans, gives Ryo lunch, starts dinner, and folds the laundry that her mother hung out to dry before leaving for work.

The Japanese government, spooked about the plunging birthrate, is frantically building more child-care centers. But for now, the only place that could keep Ryo until 9 p.m., when Sachie finishes teaching, is an unlicensed, unregulated nursery a 25-minute drive away. So Chizuko rises at 5 a.m. in order to start work early so she can get home in time to baby-sit.

It is this intense intimacy and interdependence that make it so difficult for Sachie to decide whether to burden her mother with another grandchild. In a society that shuns confrontation--and so avoids potentially hurtful conversations--it’s difficult for mother and daughter to discuss their dilemma.

“My mother says: ‘Have another one. It will be harder for you and the children if there’s a big age gap,’ ” Sachie says. “She says she would rather baby-sit the child now, while she’s still young. But we both know how difficult that is. I am so divided.”

Chizuko has worked all her life in low-wage jobs. It’s not just for the money; Sachie’s father has a steady job at the local Mitsubishi plant. But Chizuko came as a bride into her husband’s home, living meekly alongside his parents and his grandmother. She preferred working to staying home with the two women.

Now, Chizuko stitches dish towels 35 hours a week. The pay is low, but she does have benefits, including a pension.

Middle-aged Japanese worry that the aging of society will force their debt-ridden government to scale back retirement benefits. Poorly paid women like Chizuko feel especially vulnerable. She has just three years of work left to qualify for a 25-year pension.

“If I put more burden on her [by having another baby], she would have to quit,” Sachie says. “She doesn’t want to quit, and she doesn’t want to spend 24 hours a day with her mother-in-law. . . . I feel sorry for her, and I don’t want to be a burden.”

Chizuko comes home at 3:30 p.m., and Ryo, sensing that his mother is about to leave, begins to howl. “No! NO! Nonononooooooo!”

“Mama has to work, Mama has to work,” whispers Chizuko, prying the child away so her daughter can trade her apron for a prim plaid dress.

As Sachie backs the minivan out of the driveway to the first of five lessons, Ryo is still wailing. “The radishes aren’t cooked all the way through yet!” Sachie hollers out the car window. “But I made dumplings--they’re in the fridge.”

After Sachie drives off, Chizuko confides that she wishes Sachie would have another baby, but put the children in day care, or quit working and stay home.

“But I can’t bring myself to say so,” she says. “She would get so angry.”

Chizuko recounts how older women at her factory complain about their daughters-in-law, who enjoy “freedom” to have careers, children and material wealth. To their elders, they appear selfish and ungrateful. With characteristic Japanese indirectness, Chizuko’s story leaves her criticism of her own daughter unstated.

Chizuko misses Ryo when he’s not around, yet after 30 years of marriage, she’d like some freedom herself.

“There are times when I wonder whether my life will end this way,” she says. “I would like to go places and see things. I don’t have any particular place in mind. But when my friends say, ‘Let’s go to a hot springs resort,’ I wish I could go, for even one night.”

Then, as conflicted as her daughter, she adds: “But from the point of view of this child, it would be better for him to have a sibling. . . . If I’m going to have to baby-sit, then sooner is better. I don’t want to quit my job, but if I have to quit, I will.”

Sachie, however, won’t quit. With the number of children declining, she wonders whether she could find new students after a maternity leave. And without her income, she and Shoji would be hard pressed to pay their mortgage.

Decisions on birth and child care also have long-term implications for Sachie and her son. If Ryo ends up an only child, he might one day be working to help support four elderly parents and grandparents--the kind of scenario that makes pension planners shudder. But a new baby could make Sachie the main caretaker for up to five dependents--a responsibility that could strain a young couple to the breaking point.

Sachie and Shoji reel off many other reasons not to have a child. The high cost of pregnancy and delivery. The agony of childbirth in a country where painkillers are rarely given. And the problem most often cited: the huge expense of raising a child in a society where first-graders have personal computers and cram schools, and where music lessons and a private college are considered essential.

In Japan’s boom years, Shoji could have expected a bigger bonus every year, but those days are over. Mitsubishi’s sales have plummeted, and Shoji has seen his bosses get rid of excess workers by giving them mandatory transfers that require them to commute two hours or more each way. In contrast to previous generations, the Takamoris are not confident that the future will be better.

“Even if it’s really impossible for us, I want to have at least two children,” says Shoji, who grew up with three brothers. “But to tell you the truth, we have our hands full now, and we’re barely making it with one.”

And economic questions aside, their daily schedule requires samurai endurance.

Sachie will give piano lessons until 9 tonight. She will pick up Ryo by 9:30 and bring leftovers from her parents’ dinner to eat at home. If Shoji manages to get home by 10 p.m., the three can enjoy a bath together. Sachie will do the laundry, fill the rice cooker and clean up.

They go to sleep by 1 a.m., so they can do it all again tomorrow.