Fat with child, Sakiko Wakita was getting desperate. She had to give birth by Nov. 30–only five days away. She resorted to a folklore remedy: On her knees, she scrubbed furiously at her kitchen floor.
“You can come out now,” she repeated in a mantra to her unborn child.
She was scrubbing against the rigid deadline for Japan’s chronically short supply of subsidized nurseries. The deadline has put a bureaucratic timetable on the pregnancies of Japanese working women, who must try to give birth before the fall application cutoff for the next year’s class at their local nursery to get affordable day care.
It worked. On Nov. 26, the day after her cleaning frenzy, Wakita gave birth to a baby boy. She rushed from the hospital just before the cutoff to apply for entrance for her child in the next class at a government-approved nursery.
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Missing the deadline would have created a dilemma, said Wakita, 36, whose salary as a translator of technical manuals would have been siphoned off by private day care. She planned her pregnancy more than a year ahead, but each month passed with no result.
“We were running out of time and had only one month left to try,” she said. Finally, a February vacation did the trick, with only one day to spare between her due date and the application deadline.
“This is a uniquely Japanese problem. You have to plan to give birth by such-and-such day of the month or else your child will miss the slot, and you have to think so far ahead,” said Machiko Osawa, a professor of human sociology at Japan Women’s University in Tokyo. The application period for most subsidized day care lasts about a month. Japan’s publicly supported system of day care is uniformly excellent and affordable, but there are too few slots. There is a growing backlog of more than 25,000 children, and tens of thousands more don’t even get on the list.
The consequence of failing to get into the subsidized system is large. Good private nurseries can cost $1,500 a month, and chilling stories of abuse in unregulated day-care centers have made parents cautious.
And if they fail to get their baby in the zero-to-1 age class in the public system, parents may be permanently locked out. In successive years, class size does not enlarge much, and vacancies generally open only when a family moves away.
“If you can’t get in [the first year], you can never get in,” said Aki Fukoin, a representative of a citizens’ group lobbying for more public nurseries. “The parents would never let go of the valuable slot they have secured.”
The day-care problem is seen as one reason women here decline motherhood, leaving Japan with one of the world’s lowest birthrates. The birthrate, in turn, is creating what may be Japan’s greatest national challenge: a projected shrinking of the population starting in 2006 that would reshape the nation.
The day-care dilemma also causes working women who elect to have children to quit their careers, even as Japan’s population decline creates a greater need for the female labor force. Only one in four women over age 15 in Japan work full time. And of those, two out of three quit when they have children, according to statistics kept by the Ministry of Health and Welfare.
“What it comes down to is that the treasure–women’s capabilities–is being left unused in Japan,” Osawa said. “The environment for childrearing is non-existent.”
The day-care squeeze leaves women little choice. Yukari Motohashi, 28, gave birth in February 2001, far too late for the deadline. Her salary as an accountant would hardly cover expensive private day care, and with no one else to look after her son, she had to quit her job. She now lobbies the local nursery in hopes of getting any vacancy that opens.
“I participate in every public event held by the nursery that I can, meeting the teachers, hoping that knowing me would help my child be accepted,” she said. “But it hasn’t so far. It looks like I won’t be able to go back to work for a very long time.”