This move was made as an effort to overthrow Japan’s title of “world’s oldest population”.
TOKYO: Japan has decided to test a new approach – the four-day work week – to escape its global reputation as having the world’s oldest population. The country’s capital and largest city, Tokyo, has decided to take the lead in solving this problem.
The new working week will be implemented in April next year. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government, one of the country’s largest employers, will allow its employees to work for only four days, along with a new “partial child care leave” policy. . Taken together, this will not only reduce the number of days worked but also the number of hours worked each day – for starters, this policy will allow parents to work two hours less per day.
We will continue to look at flexible working styles to ensure that women do not have to sacrifice their careers because of life events such as giving birth or raising children.
Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike
The new policy takes effect after the birth rate reached a record low in 2024. In the first half of the calendar year, the number of new births was 5.7% lower than in the same period in 2023. Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare shared data showing 350,074 babies born between January 2024 and June 2024.
While the birth rate in Japan is 1.2, in the capital Tokyo it is 0.99. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) says a birth rate of 2.1 is needed to maintain a stable population. So the lower rate in Japan leaves the government with the option of corrective measures. Furthermore, the average age of Japanese citizens is 49.9 years, significantly lower than the United States’ 38.9 years.
This is not the first step the East Asian country has taken to improve its low birth rate. Since the 1990s, Japan has implemented initiatives such as longer parental leave, subsidized day care as well as cash payments to parents. The government has also gone a step further with the launch of dating apps to help single people get married. But despite all this, the birth rate in Japan continues to decline.
The new policy on reducing working days is expected to address several core issues, including reducing the culture of heavy work. In particular, women in Japan are doing five times more unpaid labor than men, and this policy aims to reduce that gap and ease the burden on women.
The decline in working days has seen men spend more time taking care of children and women are increasingly willing to have more children. For businesses too, there are experiments conducted around the world that prove that cutting back on the work day improves employee productivity and leads to higher motivation.
Also read: Selena Gomez responds to Emilia Perez’s criticism