OPINION> OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS
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OPINION> OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS
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Baby boomers can make Japan boom again
By Yoshibumi Wakamiya (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-10-23 08:39 Baby boomers have finally attained power in Japan through a historic change. The thought filled me with deep emotion, perhaps because I, too, belong to that generation. Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama was born in February 1947. Deputy Prime Minister Naoto Kan, 63, who along with Hatoyama formed the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), is just a year older. Born in October 1946, Kan was a student movement leader at the Tokyo Institute of Technology before becoming a citizens' movement activist and eventually entering politics. Thirty years ago, Kan had declared that he would oust the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) one day. The path he followed to do that is typical of a baby boomer.
Former US presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both were born in 1946. The two were in the White House for a combined 16 years. Now, the US leadership is in the hands of Barack Obama, who at 48 can be said to represent the "late baby-boomer generation". In Britain, Tony Blair, who became prime minister in his 40s, is now 56, and his successor, Gordon Brown, 58. French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are even younger at 54 and 55. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who led the country as president for two terms, is 57. By comparison, Japan's leadership appears to be running one lap behind the rest of the world. New LDP president Sadakazu Tanigaki is 64. So compared with the DPJ under the leadership of Hatoyama and Kan, the LDP lacks leaders from the baby-boomer generation. Is it because LDP members underwent a traumatic experience as students when the leftist Zenkyoto activists dominated their movement in the late 1960s? Different as the DPJ leadership is, it was expected to change the course of Japanese politics and policies. It has done exactly that by coming up with a drastic environmental policy aimed at mitigating global warming. But there are other important issues that the DPJ government has to resolve. I attended a dinner held in honor of visiting French economist and scholar Jacques Attali on the night of Sept 16, the day the Hatoyama Cabinet was formed. Attali, who served as a special adviser to former French president Francois Mitterrand, is now adviser to President Sarkozy. The economist has been pessimistic about Japan's future in his book, A Brief History of the Future. When I asked him about it, he said: "Japan's weaknesses are the declining population and longevity. The new administration must take effective measures to deal with those problems." That is precisely the problem the baby-boomer administration has to deal with. According to Masahiro Yamada, who specializes in family sociology, baby boomers were the last generation when it was the norm for families to have up to four children. They had an average of 2.2 children but their offspring have just an average 1.2 to 1.3. "Parasite singles", who stay single and are supported by their parents, are also on the rise. This is why baby boomers are called "a generation that failed in child-rearing". As baby boomers grow older, the costs of medicine, nursing and pensions keep swelling. The problem has been there for years, but earlier governments did not take any fundamental measure to tackle it. Now that the baby boomers have come to power, the government should address the problem. First, the trend of fewer children must be reversed. Since baby boomers are too old to enlarge their families, they have to come up with measures to encourage young people to start families and have more children. The DPJ's policy of granting a child allowance is one such measure. Greater efforts have to be made to expand and improve services such as day-care centers, nurseries and after-school care programs. And this is where the baby boomers can play a useful role. They can work as volunteers for a token payment, which in turn will help them maintain better health. Society has an obligation to respect and take good care of the elderly. In return, baby boomers need to ensure that they do not become a financial burden on society. A few years ago, Kan started a "baby-boomer party" movement to encourage people of his generation to keep contributing to society even after retirement. As loyal company employees, the baby boomers helped Japan transform into a major economic power. But society had changed before they even realized it, and they could not achieve what they really wanted. The baby-boomer party movement has come up with several policy proposals. And now that Kan is deputy prime minister as well as the state minister in charge of national strategy, he should go a step further and make the "baby-boomer party" a national project to devise a strategy to reverse the declining birthrate and solve the problems of an aging society. The author is an Asahi Shimbun columnist The Asahi Shimbun (China Daily 10/23/2009 page9) |
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