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Japanese bankers working at Mitsubishi UFJ have recently been granted shorter work hours as part of the bank's attempt to persuade employees to do their part in alleviating Japan's low fertility rates. Japan has a notoriously low birth rate and nearly a quarter of its population is over 65, which has prompted government officials to seek out new ways to combat the country's population crisis.

The Times Online has an interesting, but short, article on the matter :

With the recovery tenuous, deflation afflicting all levels of commerce and the country at risk of sovereign debt crisis, it seemed an odd time for Japan’s biggest and most austere banking group to be telling its staff to knock off early.

Particularly when they realised how they were supposed to be using the extra one hour and 50 minutes of free time. The national birthrate is low, ran the round-robin e-mail that landed in people’s in-boxes on Monday, so let’s all enjoy “family time”.

The unambiguous note of encouragement heralded Mitsubishi UFJ’s week-long effort to help to reverse Japan’s ultra-low fertility rates and declining population: joining a national campaign in which both enthusiasm and participation is expected to be miserably low. MUFJ is believed to be among only a tiny number of companies taking the scheme seriously.

Management’s idea, according to a woman who works on the bank’s Tokyo trading floor, seemed to be that by getting everyone out of the office by 5.10pm, rather than the 7pm that most staff were used to, couples would be reunited earlier after work, passion would not be crushed by exhaustion and Japan’s chronic population decline would be reversed.

The full article can be found here.

As humorous as the idea may seem to us, Japan's greying population may be an early warning to other countries which are experiencing similar problems with declining birth rates. The question is, what has caused Japan's birth rate to sink to a dangerously low level? Some suggest that Japan's "salaryman" culture is to blame, that exhausted businessmen and company employees have little time and energy to devote to their wives and families. Others blame various sub-cultures and social phenomena, such as the hikikomori and soushoku danshi ("grass-eating men"), and the increasing number of women (and men) who remain single and childless for Japan's population woes.

Whatever the cause, it's a problem that will not be solved overnight or even by stunts such as this one. Economic incentives may be one solution. Countries such as France and Singapore have occasionally resorted to offering tax breaks and benefits as a way of convincing couples to procreate. One acquaintance of mine suggested that Japan could alleviate part of the problem by relaxing its immigration laws and attracting foreign labour but this doesn't seem like a likely option.

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