Tokyo ordered a four-day work week. Because of the birth rate

The program, which sees the capital of the Land of the Rising Sun join a growing global movement of local and central governments to implement a “four days a week, three days off” approach to work-life balance, comes at a time when Japan’s population on the way to the sixteenth consecutive annual decline in the birth rate, wrote the Financial Times.

The Tokyo government’s project, which will start in April 2025, allows employees to adjust their working hours so that they can take one day of their choice off completely each week. The project should be used by thousands of employees of the city administration.

The town hall also announced another measure that will allow parents with children in the first to third grade of elementary school to exchange part of their salary for the possibility of leaving work earlier, CNN pointed out.

A larger block of non-working time and enhanced flexibility should – in theory – reduce the difficulty of raising children. The number of births in Tokyo fell by more than 15 percent between 2012 and 2022.

“We will continue the flexible work style revision so that no one has to sacrifice their career for life events such as childbirth and child care,” Tokyo Governor Juriko Koike said at a city council meeting. “The time has come for Tokyo to take the initiative to protect and strengthen the lives, livelihoods and economy of our people in these challenging times for the nation,” she added, noting that the goal of empowering women remains a long-standing issue for Japan and an area where the country lags far behind. the rest of the world.

The Tokyo experiment of a four-day week follows similar programs in local governments of prefectures and cities throughout Japan.

Tokyo has bet on the magical power of the four-day work week at a time when the number of children born in Japan in 2024 will fall below 700,000 for the first time since records began in 1899.

These numbers underline Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s warning that Japan’s demographic trends represent a “quiet emergency… that threatens the very foundations of the country.” The economy is already struggling with the consequences of a labor shortage and the highest proportion of senior citizens in the world.

The number of children born in Japan fell below one million in 2016 and below 800 thousand in 2022. And this despite the government’s efforts, including monetary incentives for larger families, tax breaks and the establishment of more day care facilities.

Last year, statistics recorded only 727,277 births, while the birth rate (the number of children a woman has in her lifetime) fell to a new low of 1.2, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Social Affairs. In order for the population to remain stable, it needs to be 2.1.

Japan’s central government is pushing a series of “now or never” measures to reverse the population crisis, including providing paternity leave for men, while other local governments have also introduced measures to improve working conditions.

Many sociologists attribute the steadily declining birth rate to Japan’s unrelenting work culture and the rising cost of living. Exhausting working hours have long been a problem for Japanese companies, where employees often suffer from health risks and, in extreme cases, so-called karoshi, i.e. death from overwork.

“Tokyo’s efforts to address the low birth rate are becoming increasingly desperate. The capital’s government launched the dating app this year in the hope that its official association with the software and strict membership rules will ease fears and attract users who are serious about starting marriages and families,” noted the Financial Times.

In addition to personal and educational information, the app requires users to promise that they are using it for the purpose of marriage and not for short-term relationships.

Governor Koike is one of many politicians who consider the low marriage rate in Japan to be a direct obstacle to more children being born.

Tokyo is not the only place in Asia where more family-friendly policies are being implemented. Singapore, for example, applies new guidelines from the beginning of 2024, according to which all companies must consider employees’ requests for flexible working hours. This may include a four-day working week or flexible working hours.