Japan Urges Dads to Make Time for Babies Amid Population Worries

Japan’s new dads have been slow to take advantage of chances to spend more time with their newborn children, so the government is giving them another nudge.

Faced with the challenges that a declining population represents to its workforce, social security system, and security, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s government has rolled out new legislation, effective this month, requiring big companies to say publicly how many men are taking parental leave in the hopes that socially conscious employers will encourage the practice. Showing new dads the joys of fatherhood and easing the pressure on new moms—or so the thinking goes—will encourage bigger families.

“We found that developed countries where men spend a lot of time taking care of their children and doing housework tend to have higher birth rates,” said Shintaro Yamaguchi, a professor of economics at the University of Tokyo.

Japan’s population declined in 2022 for a 12th straight year, falling by 556,000 to 125 million, the government said April 12. The new law is one of the “last chance” measures to arrest the declining birthrate. Under the legislation, companies with more than 1,000 employees must report the rate at which male employees take their legally mandated paternity leave.

Skeptics note that there are factors other than a lack of parental leave holding back men’s contribution to child-rearing. They include a corporate culture that prizes long hours at the office, and social conventions that relegate housework and childcare to mothers—even when the mothers are also working. The lack of support for women on numerous levels is a major reason why the birth rate is so low, they argue.

Nor are all companies ready to embrace expanded parental leave.

“There are still some companies not welcoming a lengthy paternity leave,” said Shigeya Suzuki, director of the labor legislation bureau at Keidanren, Japan’s biggest business association. “There are unconscious biases that employees who work a lot of overtime are good employees. We should promote productivity and quality of work and get rid of those biases.”

There have been hopeful signs in recent years, Yamaguchi said, adding that “people are becoming more positive about men taking parental leave.” But the government’s target of having 50% of men taking it by 2025 “is not possible,” he added.

Limited Impact

Elected officials in some countries are trying to get male caregivers more engaged in household duties. Tokyo can point to the country’s latest leave law as evidence of its efforts. While comparing leave policies across nations is difficult because of conflicting definitions, Japanense men stand to get what is “by far the most generous paid father-specific entitlement” among countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, according to an OECD study.

Legislation that took effect in 2021 gave Japanese men the right to four weeks of paternity leave, at 67% of their usual pay. The implementation of that law helped to lift the male paternity leave rate to 13.97% in fiscal 2021 from 12.65% in fiscal 2020 and 7.48% in fiscal 2019, Ministry of Health and Welfare data show.

The new paternity leave reporting requirement will likely have a limited impact, because it applies only to companies with more than 1,000 employees. The vast majority of Japanese work for much smaller companies.

“It’s a good start, but we should require all companies, including small and medium-size companies to report,” said Haruka Shibata, a professor at Kyoto University who studies issues around childcare. “We should, at the least, require companies with 300 employees or more to report this if it’s to have a strong impact.”

Encouragement, Not Enforcement

The reporting requirement is intended to encourage companies to support the policy, but it lacks legal enforcement teeth: There is no penalty for noncompliance beyond publicly calling out the laggards.

“We will use administrative guidance, such as sending warning letters,” Hiroaki Yoshizaki, deputy section chief of the ministry’s Work and Life Balance Division said. “If they do comply, we will post the names of the companies on our website.”

For the moment, Yoshizaki added, there is no reporting requirement for how may days companies let male employees take, because the focus now “is on improving the leave rate, which is very low.”

Toyota Motor Corp. said its paternity leave rate for the birth of child was 38.9% in the fiscal year that ended March 31; that was up from 19.4% in the previous year. In both years, the average leave time was 1.9 months.

Sony said the rate across all its group companies was 6.9%. It didn’t provide an average time off figure. Both companies declined to comment more broadly on the new law.

More Action to Come

Of course, it’s one thing to let new fathers take time off and another to let them take enough time off.

Nippon Life Insurance Co, has been promoting paternity leave among its employees since 2013, and has reported 100% take-up every year since 2013. But the average length of that leave was just 10 days in the fiscal year that ended March 31, 2022.

“The important issue is that paternity leave for men is too short, since most of them only take less than two weeks,” said Naoko Kuga, an expert at NLI Research Institute’s Social Improvement and Life Design Department. NLI is a unit of Nippon Life.

“I think paternity leave needs to be at least one month,” said Shibata of Kyoto University, himself the father of twins. “Ideally, like in Northern Europe, the husband and wife should share taking care of children until they can go to nursery school.”

The government isn’t done. More measures to boost the birth rate are set to be finalized in June.

“Japan is currently spending 6.1 trillion yen ($46.3 billion) a year to help boost the birth rate,” Shibata said. That, he said, is only about half as much as it needs to spend.