ninme

The Times – Go home and multiply! Bank gives staff an early night to halt Japan’s falling birthrate

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.

I think this is an especially big deal because once upon a time I read that abortion rates were extremely high in Japan because it was considered less of a big deal to get one after the fact of being pregnant than it was talking about contraception. And I think I have read oblique references to the idea that the government finds it hard asking people outright to go home and, ahh, get a move on, as it were. So yes, it’s interesting.

Three days into “family week” — with many staff apparently too embarrassed to sidle home early — MUFJ brought Japan’s wider economic woes under the spotlight. The country is aging fast and industry is losing both the people and the skills that once made it such a formidable global competitor. The big banks that once powered Japan’s mighty corporate machines are accordingly far less buoyant. …

The low birthrate and shrinking population have also featured heavily in a new set of worries over Japan’s sovereign debt — the monumental pile of public borrowing that amounts to nearly 190 per cent of GDP. The debt manageable so long as Japan’s economy continues to grow. The concern is that an ever-shrinking number of Japanese youngsters will ultimately buckle under the weight of what their parents’ government borrowed.

Ahem.

And then there’s this, also from Leo Lewis:

The Times – Patter of tiny feet may follow salaryman’s demise

So many of the pathologies that blight Japan, and which the country seems so reluctant to diagnose — suicide, bullying, an ultra-low birthrate — are a blowback from the Age of the Salaryman.

The great problem was that the salaryman legend started, quite early in the day, to feed on itself. It swallowed its own ethos that work and the company trumped everything, then fed all that to its wives and children, who eventually believed it, too. It developed a cult of after-work drinking and eating that made it seem normal never to dine at home. That soon became the institutionalised infidelity of nightly visits to hostess bars with the boss, and that too became normal.

Hmm.