Job Research Institute, a research body run by Persol Career (the company behind the job-change service “doda”), has published survey results naming “rising wages” as the policy most needed to combat Japan’s declining birth rate. On 5ch, this struck a chord with users pointing to soaring education and child-rearing costs, but plenty pushed back too — “wages were low in the Meiji era too, and yet people had lots of kids,” “it’s not about money, it’s about having too many other options” — leaving opinion split.
Job Research Institute, a research body operated by Persol Career Co., which also runs the job-change service “doda,” conducted a “2026 Survey on Awareness of the Declining Birthrate” targeting 450 working men and women.
The survey sheds light on working people’s attitudes toward the declining birth rate, covering the gap between the ideal and actual number of children, the factors standing in the way, how personally responsible people feel about the issue, and what policies they think are needed to improve it.
・Ideal vs. actual number of children
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What do we need to do to stop the birth rate from falling?
Instead of just criticizing everything, come up with some ideas.
Why does everyone only complain?
Crack down on real estate speculation.
Housing's become a plaything for capitalists, so it's just way too expensive.
Foreigners shouldn't be allowed to buy and sell it however they please.
Make childbirth and childcare a state duty (paid public service) and numbers will go up.
Abolish compulsory education. Education costs way too much.
Even back in the low-wage Meiji era, the number of kids kept rising.
Do you not get that the cost of raising kids is completely different now than it was back then?
These days there's this pervasive attitude that if you can't give your kid all sorts of experiences and put them through university, the poor kid is being shortchanged.
Also, back then kids were labor, but nowadays a kid brings absolutely nothing to the household.
In other words, in today's world a child is just a liability.
Because kids can be used as labor.
In developing countries the main industry is primary-sector work close to home, so the whole family can pitch in as labor.
In developed countries full of salaried workers, you can't put kids to work, so a child is just a luxury item with no practical payoff.
No point pushing more full-time housewives.
Watching three kids alone is brutal.
It's easier — and brings in money — to drop them at daycare and go to work.
Money isn't even the important thing here.
Wait, is it actually going up for civil servants?
We'd need an actual survey on whether the birth rate is higher among civil servants.
Civil servants already have an insanely high birth rate to begin with.
and lower wages (and status) for college-educated white-collar workers — flip the social hierarchy.
If that's what it takes, I'd rather just keep the birth rate falling.
Blue-collar jobs can just be replaced with immigrant labor.
Do you realize how dumb that sounds?
And with no money, then what?
Just mass-produce more high-school grads raised poor?
Re: #66
Sending them off to daycare is the sadder option, if anything.
It's mostly money.
The families who manage to have three kids are doctors, civil servants, or big-corporation households.
In areas where young women move away, the denominator shrinks, so the birth rate looks higher.
Because the cause isn't money — it's having too many other options.
In the countryside people often inherit land and a house from their parents, so even without money there's a decent amount of breathing room.
Just design the system so having kids actually pays off.
One-time support just at birth doesn't work.
It weakens the sense of responsibility for raising the kid.
They need to hand out a massive child allowance instead.
We're a democracy, so doing that would lose you the election — parents with kids are a tiny minority.
Background and Key Points
Persol Career runs doda, one of Japan’s largest job-change platforms, and its research arm periodically surveys the working population on social issues tied to employment. Japan’s total fertility rate has sat below 1.3 for years despite decades of child-allowance and daycare-expansion policies, so a 450-person sample naming “higher wages” as the top fix is notable mainly because it cuts against the government’s current toolkit, which leans on subsidies and facilities rather than income growth itself. The Meiji-era comparison posters raised is a real historical touchstone in Japan — birth rates were high through the early twentieth century — but it’s usually invoked loosely, without noting that child mortality was severe and children functioned as agricultural labor, contexts the thread doesn’t spell out.
The thread’s real fault line isn’t “money matters vs. doesn’t” — nearly everyone agrees costs are a factor — it’s whether money is the root cause or just one visible symptom of something else: the “too many other options” camp argues urban, salaried life offers status, leisure, and comfort that having children can’t compete with, whereas the wage camp treats children as a straightforward cost-benefit problem that better pay would fix.
What the thread never engages with is why civil servants and dual-professional households reportedly have more kids despite Japan’s high income tax and social-insurance burden — job security and predictable schedules, not raw salary, may matter more than wage level. It also never questions whether a 450-respondent doda survey of working adults, a group skewed toward urban, salaried professionals, can speak for rural or non-regular workers at all.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Newsplus) thread “‘Rising Wages’ Needed to Fix Japan’s Declining Birth Rate, Job Research Institute Finds”.
