Gender inequality accelerates Japan’s rural depopulation

Households within the U.S. and all over the world are having fewer kids as folks make profoundly completely different selections about their lives. NPR’s collection Inhabitants Shift: How Smaller Households Are Altering the World explores the causes and implications of this pattern.

AKITA, Japan — Younger males in conventional competition garments steadiness heavy bamboo poles as much as 40 ft excessive on their heads, arms, hips and shoulders. Crossbars on the poles carry dozens of candlelit paper lanterns.

Half ritual, half competition and half competitors, kanto is a centuries-old show of energy, talent and tradition distinctive to Akita Prefecture, in northern Japan’s Tohoku area.

Historically, solely males are allowed to the touch the poles. Girls play flutes and drums.

Kanto practitioners imagine that ladies can’t take part as a result of, based on Japan’s Shinto faith, girls’s blood from menstruation and childbirth is taken into account impure for the aim of non secular rituals.

Some Japanese girls settle for Kanto’s gender divisions as a part of the tradition, or just chorus from criticizing them. Faculty pupil Mayaka Ogawa, for instance, says, “We will not actually argue towards custom and spiritual causes.”

Kanto is emblematic of each Akita’s cultural splendor and its conservative rural society.

And Akita itself is emblematic of Japan’s twenty first century demographic challenges: It has essentially the most aged inhabitants (39% have been over age 65 in 2024), the bottom start fee and the quickest declining inhabitants of Japan’s 47 prefectures, based on authorities figures. Gender inequality is accelerating depopulation in rural areas like this.

Rural girls flee gender inequality

A Japanese authorities report on inequality revealed in June discovered that 27% of younger girls need to depart their hometowns, in comparison with 15% of younger males — and inflexible gender roles in rural society are prompting younger girls to vote with their ft.

The survey reveals that the majority girls transfer to the cities in the hunt for higher employment alternatives — however there is a gender angle to that, too. Widespread expectations that ladies will prioritize house responsibilities and childcare additionally diminish younger girls’s instructional prospects, motivating them to go away rural areas.

In rural communities, “girls are caught in short-term or part-time jobs and solely males get promoted. Girls do not need to work in these locations, so that they transfer to Tokyo,” says Chuo College sociologist Masahiro Yamada.

The issue is persistent, he says, as a result of “middle-aged and older males in rural areas do not need to change the present scenario of discrimination towards girls.”

Whereas final month’s number of Sanae Takaichi as Japan’s first feminine prime minister breaks an necessary glass ceiling, she advocates a conservative, conventional view of gender roles.

Japanese girls’s political empowerment ranks a hundred and twenty fifth out of 148 nations within the World Financial Discussion board’s Gender Hole Report for 2025.

A examine final yr discovered that 744 Japanese municipalities, or 43% of the overall, principally in rural areas, are susceptible to disappearing as a result of their proportion of ladies of childbearing age are anticipated to drop by half by mid-century.

However the results of depopulation in Japan are already inconceivable to overlook. Lots of of hundreds of jobs go unfilled as a consequence of labor shortages. Tens of millions of properties stand vacant or deserted.

Making girls’s voices heard

Whereas the exodus of rural girls continues, some girls keep put or return to rural areas to attempt to enhance them.

Ren Yamamoto wished to make younger rural girls’s voices heard. So the 26-year-old resident of Nirasaki, a metropolis in Yamanashi Prefecture — dwelling to Mount Fuji and a few 80 miles west of Tokyo — taped 100 interviews with rural girls and began her personal YouTube channel.

Lots of her interviewees informed her “once they return to their hometowns, they’re requested: ‘when are you getting married? when are you going to have kids?’ they usually’re sick of being pressured into such a job,” she says.

Japan’s public broadcaster NHK reported on her mission. Earlier this yr, then-Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba invited her to fulfill with him.

“Insurance policies to assist girls have been centered on childcare and marriage, with out addressing the the explanation why girls depart rural areas,” Yamamoto informed Ishiba. “Policymakers have not confronted the truth that girls have their very own decisions to make. We really feel like we’re seen as baby-making machines.”

Ishiba informed Yamamoto he was making an attempt to enhance the scenario, however it was robust as a result of native officers are overwhelmingly middle-aged males.

The federal government searches for coverage fixes

Japan’s authorities has identified that the problems of gender equality and falling birthrate are inseparably linked. Central and native authorities try varied insurance policies to handle each points.

Some native governments, together with Tokyo’s and Akita’s, function matchmakers to attempt to enhance marriages and births.

“I hate that,” exclaims Mayaka Ogawa, the Akita faculty pupil. “It nearly comes throughout as girls cannot do it for themselves.” She provides: “Girls are beginning to awaken to the truth that they do not really want to kind a household as a way to be fulfilled.”

On a current weekend, a handful of principally middle-aged girls attended a lecture in Akita, the place an “assertiveness coach” coached them on how one can persuade husbands to assist extra with house responsibilities and childcare. A poster for the occasion reveals drawings of smiling males ironing laundry and cradling kids.

“Regardless that so many individuals throughout Japan are placing in a lot effort [toward gender equality], we nonetheless discover ourselves in a scenario the place progress is painfully gradual,” says Naoko Tani, director of the Akita Prefectural Central Gender Equality Middle, which hosted the lecture.

Gnawing unease and pessimism

Some Akita girls say they undergo from moya moya, a obscure, gnawing sense that issues aren’t proper, however they can not put their finger on it. Taboos towards difficult gender roles and male authority thicken the fog of moya moya.

Tani says she too as soon as suffered from this confusion, however “by means of studying about issues from a gender perspective, there have been moments when issues out of the blue clicked for me — after I thought, ‘Ah, so that is what it is about.’ And at these instances, the conclusion moved me to tears.”

Others are simply moved to go away and never look again.

“Akita is commonly referred to as an remoted island on land,” says highschool pupil Yukina Oguma, whose household are hereditary managers of a Buddhist temple in Akita.

She plans to go to varsity in one other prefecture.

Requested what she would do if she have been informed or anticipated to remain in Akita and take over the temple, she replies, “I might run away.”

Some girls are pessimistic about bettering gender equality in Akita anytime quickly.

“Let Akita be depopulated. There isn’t any approach of stopping it, truthfully talking,” argues faculty pupil Miwa Sawano. “They will not understand they’ve an issue till the ladies depart.”

Chie Kobayashi contributed to this report in Tokyo and Yamanashi and Akita Prefectures.