While attending a recent symposium sponsored by the Cabinet on Japan’s low birthrate, which the government has pledged to raise by any means possible, a reporter for Tokyo Shimbun discovered that the so-called fertility rate statistic published by the government doesn’t properly represent what people might think it represents. 

During the symposium, a representative made a presentation in which he explained that the projection for Japan’s fertility rate in the year 2070 would be 1.29, which is only fractionally higher than last year’s rate, which was 1.26. These projections were made based on current trends in the birthrate. However, when the staff member explained how the number was calculated, he said that only Japanese women were included and not foreign resident women, while babies born to both Japanese and foreign women were included. According to the reporter, the attendees expressed shock, saying they weren’t aware that foreign resident women were not counted in the statistic. One professor told the reporter he found this revelation “unbelievable,” especially given the fact that the foreign population of Japan is on the rise. 

The fertility rate is supposed to represent the number of children the average woman will give birth to in her lifetime, and a number of around 2.0 is believed to be necessary in order to maintain the population of a given country. However, the calculation is made on a yearly basis to chart trends. To reach the index, the total number of live births in the population within a given time frame—in this case, a year—is divided by the number of females in the population aged 15 to 49, and the resulting quotient is multiplied by 1,000. Obviously, not counting foreign women in this formula while counting the children they produce is going to alter the index, though it isn’t really clear by how much. Mathematically, it would seem that the more women you add to the divisor in the equation, the smaller the quotient and thus the smaller the fertility rate, but the article doesn’t really explain the different numbers offered at the symposium in a comprehensible manner.

A representative of the health ministry told Tokyo Shimbun that population statistics, including those used to chart the fertility rate, only take into consideration Japanese people, and that this has always been the case, so to change it now would throw the whole system out of whack. Children of foreign mothers are included in these calculations if the mother is married to a Japanese national, since a child is considered Japanese if either parent is Japanese. (Though that has only been the case since 1985. Before then a child’s nationality was determined solely through the nationality of the father.)

Another person from the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research told the reporter that the current methods for compiling population statistics go back to the Meiji Era and are based on the Family Register (koseki) Law, which only applies to Japanese people. When the fertility rate statistic was adopted right after World War II, there were few foreigners living in Japan, so they weren’t counted. One wonders about all the resident Koreans who, before the end of the war, were considered Japanese and after the war suddenly weren’t; not to mention all the Chinese who had never been Japanese but had lived in Japan for many years. 

Nevertheless, as more than a few people at the symposium pointed out, the number of foreign women giving birth in Japan is increasing, and it seems misleading, if not downright discriminatory, not to count them when determining the fertility rate, regardless how useful the fertility rate is in the first place. The data researcher put it quite plainly: in other countries of the world, they count all the women who give birth in their statistics and not just citizens.