午夜剧场

For the past 30 years, various measures have been launched to address the declining birthrate, and "unprecedented" countermeasures are now beginning. Is Japan truly a country where it is easy to raise children?

This book focuses on the walls that mothers who wish to work while raising children encounter in Japanese society. In October 2017, a survey was conducted to see what differences emerged between those who were able to enroll their children in nursery schools and those who were not. The survey was conducted in City A, a suburb of a metropolitan area. With the city's cooperation, the survey was sent to all approximately 2,300 households that applied for admission to the city for April 2017. More than 60% of the people responded, but what caught our attention most was the free-response section at the end of the questionnaire. There, mothers had filled the space with their worries and thoughts.

It was filled not only with laments such as "I had to quit my job because I couldn't get into a nursery school," but also with the voices of mothers who felt conflicted about the unbalanced burden of housework and childcare with their husbands at home, and their worries at the workplace. While individual mothers were expressing personal concerns, there were mothers with the same worries as if they had prearranged it, suggesting that these are problems created structurally.

Deciphering these responses reveals that mothers are faced with three walls: the "childcare wall," the "home wall," and the "workplace wall," and these three walls are intertwined. In a workplace where the standard way of working is based on male employees whose wives handle all housework and childcare under the premise of a gender-based division of labor, mothers are treated like second-tier employees who feel out of place. If a mother takes on all the housework and childcare at home, she becomes exhausted. While some blamed the husbands in front of them, others expressed hope that the way everyone works would change so that husbands could change as well.

Becoming a mother leads to fewer employment opportunities and lower income. This is sometimes called the "child penalty," and Japan is the country where this is most significant. In other words, the various burdens of child-rearing fall solely on the mother, and in Japanese society, "becoming a mother" is a trade-off for "giving something up." We must not make child-rearing the sole responsibility of the mother; instead, society should support child-rearing and the mothers themselves. An environment is needed where mothers can give birth to and raise children without worry.

Masako Maeda

Iwanami Shoten

222 pages, 1,980 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations and job titles are as of the time of publication.