A Young Physician Decides One Child Is Enough

Maybe it was the men on the subway who pretended to sleep to avoid giving up their seats to the woman with the gargantuan belly.

Or maybe it was the speeding cars that didn’t slow down as she pushed her stroller along narrow neighborhood streets with no sidewalks.

Or was it the undisguised annoyance of fellow commuters at the woman with child, stroller and parcels who occupied more than her perceived share of real estate on jampacked trains; the woman who presented a slow-moving obstacle to rush-hour traffic as she trudged up the steep station stairs?

Or maybe it’s the $18 an hour that Dr. Mio Masuda pays a baby-sitter to look after her 2-year-old daughter, Mayu, so she can work while her husband finishes his medical training?

There are many reasons not to have a baby in Japan, a country once world-famous for its reverence of children. From a corporate culture that demands marathon hours to its cramped, concrete playgrounds, institutionalized cram schools and lack of child care, Japan is now distinctly less hospitable to children, and especially to working mothers.

So Masuda, a 31-year-old endocrinologist, and her husband have decided that one is enough. And even though most Japanese believe that an only child is a lonely child, baby Mayu will have lots of company in the one-child club.

Today’s Japanese women have unprecedented opportunity and earning power. True, for some, the glass ceiling still feels like it’s made of cement. But women who keep working full time in a system that rewards seniority earn 80% to 90% of the average male wage--and Japanese men are among the best paid in the world.

But most Japanese women want or need to stay home while their children are young. And when they try to reenter the work force, they discover that the only positions offered are menial and part-time, with no job security and no benefits. Women who work part time earn just 42% of the average male wage, according to the Labor Ministry.

A statistical analysis by Sophia University economist Naohiro Yashiro has proved what Japanese working mothers already knew: Child-rearing is bad for the career. Women who have more than one child are even more likely to have to quit their jobs, and they are less likely to recover their lost incomes later.

Some married women who have been hurt by the country’s economic downturn are resorting to abortion to keep their family size small, says Dr. Kenji Hayashi, a demographer and specialist in family planning at the National Institute of Public Health.

Masuda bore her child at the end of her medical training. She left her job at a prestigious university hospital to work part time with a child-friendly schedule at the private hospital run and owned by her family. She plans to return to a full-time job once Mayu enters kindergarten.

The young doctor’s income, education and occupation put her in the Japanese professional elite. But Masuda is on the wrong side of a huge divide for working mothers, separating those whose mothers or mothers-in-law will baby-sit and those whose relatives can’t or won’t. Masuda’s mother works and has never volunteered.

Masuda and her husband could put Mayu into public-run day care, but they demur. Mainly it’s out of fear that the child will be exposed to too many illnesses. But there are social concerns as well.

Surveys find that more than 79% of Japanese believe that children younger than 3 should be looked after at home, whether by parents or relatives. One reason is the disdain many Japanese still feel for child-care workers. Traditionally, child care for well-to-do Japanese was provided by uba, or nursemaids, who tended to be impoverished women.

“Caring for other people’s children was something that only lower-class women did, so the attitude is still, ‘So, is it really all right to entrust your child to such a person?’ ” Masuda explains. “I’ve been told off by other women: ‘So, you leave your kid behind and get all dressed up nicely and go out?’ ”

Masuda adores her child and plans to try to find a job that will leave her time for Mayu. Still, in this hierarchical society, she can’t help but notice how far her social status plunged when she began walking around with a baby instead of a stethoscope.

Recently, she hailed a cab when it began to rain and was scolded by the driver for failing to check the weather report before venturing out with her precious tot.

“I was accustomed to being the one telling people like taxi drivers not to drink so much, to quit smoking,” she says with a wry smile. “They seem to think that all women who have children are stupid. . . . They call it ‘postpartum senility,’ but what it is, really, is that they assume you are an idiot.”

Masuda now fumes at things she never noticed: the irony that in hyper-polite Japan, men rarely offer to help baby-laden strangers; the dearth of elevators in public buildings; the number of pedestrian bridges that present major obstacles to people with children or disabilities.

Recently, she thought that she was pregnant again. She remembered her long term with Mayu, the pain of childbirth and the hard physical labor of child-rearing. Then she did a quick calculation and realized that she would probably be 40, maybe even 50, before she could return to work full time. By then, her medical training might be out of date. Her husband, still a student, has no income.

Without hesitation, she made the decision to have an abortion--then discovered that she wasn’t pregnant after all.

Most of her medical school classmates also have one child and are daunted by the idea of a second. “If they think they might be pregnant, they’re horrified,” she says.

“I wish [men] would understand the woman’s point of view, what it is like to have a life inside you,” she says. “Then a beautiful baby is born, and you cannot choose yourself over this beautiful creature. This child could be a threat to everything the woman is, but she will choose the child.”

Still, more young women, themselves pampered by their mothers, are unprepared for the strain of 24-hour-a-day child care, and they decide not to repeat the experience.

“The odds against mothers being able to live up to their own child-care ideals are high; they consider bringing up children a risky gamble,” writes Rieko Suzuki, author of a new book, “Hyper Birth Dearth: Japanese Society on the Brink of Crisis.” “Meanwhile, unable to withstand the pressure of people around them saying, ‘What, no children yet?’ they decide to have one child.”

On a recent morning, Masuda’s husband, Ayumu, was carefully tending their feverish baby before his wife rushed home to relieve him so he could study for exams.

She says Japanese men are changing: Most of the Masudas’ male classmates wash dishes and change diapers--when they are around. The problem is, they’re usually not.

To have a second child, Masuda says, she doesn’t need government subsidies. She needs a husband with an employer who would not hold it against him if he took a day off to care for a sick child. And that day has not come.

“The first thing they would say is, ‘So what’s happened to your wife?’ ”