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１．会場受付の様子

２．Ｍさんより前半マテリアルの紹介

３．Ｅ先生のテーブルの様子

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《　今回のworkshop　》
○workshop参加人数：６４名（うち新人の方：６名）
○【前半】：How to introduce Japan?
○【後半】：Wrath awaits Japanese women who shun childbearing destiny
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みなさまこんばんは、E’s club幹事のＫです。
８月６日（土）開催の第１３２回workshopの詳細をお送りいたします。
今回もE先生をお迎えしてのworkshopとなります。
E先生には後半のマテリアルをご作成いただきました。
リンク先には動画ならびに図表を含むページがあります。
なお、”Denmark’s effort to boost birth rates”の動画は多少過激な内容を含むため、視聴時はご注意ください。（視聴必須とはしません。）

前半のマテリアルはＭさんご作成いただきました。
今回は”How to introduce Japan?”というタイトルでディスカッションを行います。

[今週のマテリアル]

＜FIRST HALF＞
Today I want you to discuss how to introduce JAPAN.
I work at travel agency and I have some occasions to go abroad.
When I go to abroad, I am surprised that many people have interest in JAPAN.
So I want to introduce JAPAN to foreigner, but only from my viewpoint it is too poor, so I want to know many opinions.

＜Questions＞
How to introduce Japan?
At first, please discuss some questions below and finally please present each group’s opinions.
The answer could be multiple and could have any style.

1. Who do you think should be introduced as a historical person in JAPAN?Including the reason why.
2. What do you think should be introduced as Japanese traditions and customs?Including the reason why.
3. Where do you recommend to go in JAPAN?Including the reason why.
4. Which festival do you recommend in JAPAN？Including the reason why.
5. Share other ways to introduce JAPAN if you have.

Presentation 18:55～19:00
＜Reference＞
Rowthorn, C. et al. 2015. Lonely Planet Japan 14. Melbourne: Lonely Planet.

＜LATTER HALF＞

＜Agenda＞
Wrath awaits Japanese women who shun childbearing destiny

In addition to a stagnating economy, Japan is suffering from a seriously low birth rate—so low that in 1000 years, one demographer claims, the Japanese will be extinct. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2143748/Falling-birth-rates-mean-Japan-wont-children-15-3011-current-trend-continues.html) The country’s fertility rate fell below two children per woman in 1975, and, as of 2015, was around 1.42. But that means that its elderly population is starting to outpace its young population. In 2012, toiletries company Unicharm said that sales of its adult diapers “slightly surpassed” baby diapers for the first time since the company moved into the elderly market in 1987.

＜Questions＞
1. Have you or someone you know felt pressure to have children?
2. If you don’t already have children, would you like to some day? Why or why not?
3. Do you think there is too much pressure on women to have children?
4. Why do you think famous women who don’t want to have children are criticised?
5. Should the government be involved in controlling the birth rate? For example, encouraging contraception when the population is too high or discouraging contraception or subsidising fertility and child rearing costs when the population needs a boost? Raising taxes for couples who have no children?
o China’s one child policy experiment
o Denmark’s effort to boost birth rates – https://youtu.be/vrO3TfJc9Qw
o Singapore’s National Night campaign – https://youtu.be/MRZ3VGLnO1I
6. Do men and women have a patriotic duty to have children? Why or why not?

＜Reference＞
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/05/21/national/media-national/wrath-awaits-japanese-women-shun-childbearing-destiny/#.V5xML1fyqrU

Difficult choices: Women who publicly admit they don’t want children, such as actress Tomoko Yamaguchi, may face criticism, especially in the current atmosphere of social pressure to increase Japan’s population. To some, such a position is no longer simply a denial of a women’s ‘female destiny’; it is also a disavowal of the privilege of being Japanese. | ISTOCK

Wrath awaits Japanese women who shun their childbearing ‘destiny’
by Philip Brasor

Special To The Japan Times

Back in the 1990s, actor Tomoko Yamaguchi often appeared in trendy dramas — TV shows that portrayed the lives of middle-class people who, whether married or not, only worried about what to buy and who to love. Once she turned 35, Yamaguchi was no longer considered suitable for such roles, but trendy dramas became untrendy anyway and she had managed to accrue enough star power to do other things.

Now her name has become associated with something else that, in a way, has some bearing on her past career playing housewives and single women looking for romance.

In a “long interview” that appeared in February in the women’s magazine Frau, she frankly discussed her decision to not have children. Twenty years ago, when she was 31, she married another actor, Toshiaki Karasawa. She told the magazine she has “no regrets” about being childless because she never intended to be a mother.

“I wanted to have a life that’s different from one centered on giving birth to and raising a child,” she said, adding that she knows many people have speculated she was infertile, but it wasn’t the case. She understands that when a person has a child “everything changes and you feel differently,” but she’s happy enough simply making a life with her husband.

On the surface, nothing Yamaguchi said was scandalous, but the media treated the interview as a kind of manifesto. It is almost unheard of for a woman in the public eye to admit she doesn’t want children.

Not long after the interview appeared, another actor, Norika Fujiwara, married kabuki star Kataoka Ainosuke. At the requisite marriage-announcing press conference, reporters asked the couple about children. At 44, Fujiwara is past the prime childbearing age, and perhaps it was this difficulty that Kataoka was thinking of when he pointed out that, as a kabuki actor, he can always adopt a boy (it has to be a boy) to take his professional name. After all, he himself was adopted by a kabuki family for just that purpose. But while this statement seemed to let Fujiwara off the hook, she felt compelled to add that “as a woman” she wanted to “have (Ainosuke’s) child,” and from now on would endeavor to “move toward that goal.” Statements like this are expected, even from someone such as Fujiwara, who was married previously and did not have a child.

Yamaguchi’s and Fujiwara’s respective attitudes are noteworthy since the government and the media now promote childbearing as a national imperative. In that light, Yamaguchi’s “declaration,” as some are calling it, sounds downright defiant.

Reacting to the Frau interview, one blogger on the Career Connection News site explained her own situation with regard to having or not having a child. She says she was married when she was 30, and soon thereafter started receiving the usual question: When are you going to have a child? Not “if,” but “when.” At first, she’d deflect the question by saying something like “There’s still time,” but after a few years the questions became more delicate, “as if (the interlocutor thought) I was trying to have a child but couldn’t.”

The truth is she didn’t want a child then and still isn’t sure she wants one now, but she can’t say that out loud, especially in the current atmosphere of social pressure to increase Japan’s population. Such a position is no longer simply a denial of her “female destiny”; it is also a disavowal of the privilege of being Japanese. She realized this had become an accepted way of thinking when she heard a female TV personality mention that her brother, who has three children, said he is “raising future taxpayers.” The TV personality couldn’t tell whether or not he was being facetious.

According to an April 6 article in the Asahi Shimbun, the reactions to the Yamaguchi interview on the Frau website supported the actor’s decision, but comments elsewhere on the Internet mostly said the opposite, the general opinion being that if women thought as Yamaguchi did, then “Japan would collapse.” The Frau article even inspired a Tokyo symposium organized by artist Eri Shibata, who asked whether childless women should be made to “compensate” society in other ways?

How would children feel if they are told they were conceived in order to “contribute to the state”? As one professor at the symposium pointed out, ever since the Meiji Restoration, the authorities have openly controlled the birth rate in line with the changing needs of the nation. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, birth control was discouraged in order to build an army that could expand Japanese power. In the lean days after the war, birth control was promoted to help save food and resources. Something similar has been happening ever since the government realized that the falling birthrate will have a negative effect on the economy, so it subsidizes fertility treatments.

The notion that Yamaguchi’s interview centered on her decision indicates it was the point of the article, and was probably negotiated as such beforehand, so it seems like a lost opportunity that the conversation didn’t move into other unexplored areas. No one ever queries a mother on why she did have a child, and, given the statistical increase in child abuse cases, it’s significant that no one ever asks a woman if she regrets giving birth, as the Career Connection News blogger points out. The question is considered unthinkable.

Attendant to the issue of whether or not a woman should have a child (men are conveniently excused from the discussion) is the more fundamental question of whether the matter is anyone else’s business. Childbearing has only become an “option” in the last 70 years or so, and with freedom comes doubt.

According to the Asahi article, young people are averse to having children because the pressure to procreate makes them think kids are obstacles to fulfillment rather than fulfillment itself. In the end, though, it’s their decision to make and theirs only.

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