Fertility secrets of Okinawa give birth to hope in sexless, ageing Japan
- As Japan’s population decline accelerates, births outnumber deaths in only one of 47 prefectures: Okinawa
- This is no fluke – the island chain has had the country’s top fertility rate for over 40 years. What’s its secret?
A decade after she first gave birth, Nozomi Ishikawa has become a mother for the third time. But her joy at welcoming Baby Rana into the world is tinged with just one tiny regret: that, at 33, Ishikawa thinks she will not have any more. “It’s hard work, but I like it,” she says.
Another mother, Itsuki Shimoji, 35, shares the sentiment. “Every day is a lot of fun,” she says, adding that she would ideally like to have nine kids to form a baseball team, though with her biological clock ticking she may have to settle for a more realistic number: three.
Households with two or more children are increasingly rare in Japan’s ageing society, where more and more people are delaying, and often foregoing completely, marriage and childbirth. The trend is fuelling a decline in the population that has been accelerating since 2010, leading to fears that a dwindling pool of taxpaying young workers will eventually be unable to finance health care for the elderly.
But amid the gloom, women like Ishikawa and Shimoji provide reason for hope. What links them, apart from ambitious breeding targets, is geography. Both hail from Okinawa, the only one of Japan’s 47 prefectures last year where the number of births (15,732, according to the health ministry) outnumbered deaths (12,157). That statistic is no fluke; Okinawa has had the country’s highest fertility rate for more than 40 years. Last year, when the number of births nationwide hit the lowest level (918,400) since records began in 1899, Okinawa’s total fertility rate was 1.89, compared to 1.2 for Tokyo and 1.42 across the country.
