关于日本人口危机你不得不知道的几件事_BEC初级作文

关于日本人口危机你不得不知道的几件事

Why make that assumption?

In Japan, marriage usually ends a woman's working career, even though most women are well educated. Once they have a child, women face strong social pressure to quit their jobs and assume very traditional roles, serving both the husband and the child. Mothers who want to keep working are stigmatized and usually find that employers won't hire them. Child care is scarce and expensive, while Japan's brutal work culture often demands that employees work more than 50 hours a week. Japanese husbands aren't much help either — they spend an average of one hour a day helping with the children and household chores, compared with three hours for husbands in the US and Western Europe. "You end up being a housewife with no independent income," bank worker Eri Tomita told The Observer. "It's not an option for women like me."

Could this tradition change?

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants it to. This fall, he renamed his economic plan from Abenomics to Womenomics. "Creating an environment in which women find it comfortable to work," he told the U.N. General Assembly, "is no longer a matter of choice for Japan. It is instead a matter of the greatest urgency." He promised to expand day care offerings and promote flexible work arrangements so that women would no longer have to choose between work and childbearing, and he challenged businesses to promote women to senior management. Most economists, though, think that the trends won't change fast enough to prevent a real demographic crisis. "Sooner or later," said economics professor Heizo Takenaka, "Japan will have to face the necessity of immigration."