'Next 5 years key for Japan population fall'

The next five years are crucial for Japan's efforts to halt a population decline that could threaten its economy, the cabinet minister in charge of the twin issues of gender equality and the falling birth rate said on Wednesday.
Japan announced on Tuesday that its population had shrunk in the 12 months to October 1, 2005, from the previous year -- the first decline since 1945, the last year of World War Two.
Experts have long forecast that Japan's ageing population and sagging birth rate meant its population would decline, shrinking the world's second-largest economy and leaving fewer workers to support a growing number of pensioners. But the fall has begun two years earlier than initially forecast.
"I think there is a sense of crisis," Kuniko Inoguchi, state minister for gender equality and social affairs, told Reuters in an interview.
"The next five years are crucial. We have the second baby boomers who will remain in their 30s only another five years, so I am up against a time clock," added Inoguchi, referring to the children of those born in the early post-World War Two period.
Policy makers, who once trod lightly with proposals for fear of echoing wartime nationalist efforts to boost the birth rate, have become more outspoken about the search for solutions.
Japan's fertility rate -- the average number of children a woman bears in her lifetime -- fell to a post-war low of 1.2888 in 2004 from 1.2905 in 2003. Demographers say a rate of 2.1 is needed to keep a population from declining.
"Why have we failed to reverse the declining birth rate?" Inoguchi asked. "Because we have not been effective in reforming the non-flexible, time-consuming work style and providing support for the younger generation."
The telegenic Inoguchi, 53, is a Yale graduate and former professor who served as Japan's disarmament envoy from 2002 to 2004. She was tapped for the cabinet post after she was elected to parliament's lower house in September, one of a record 26 successful female candidates from Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party.
Japan is hardly alone among advanced countries with its slumping birth rate, but Inoguchi said removing barriers to fuller female employment would help solve the baby shortage.
"It's my job to lecture people on the staggering correlation between fertility rates and labour force participation," Inoguchi said in fluent English. "The fertility rates in all countries go down with industrialisation, but most countries recover."
Japanese women tend to quit their jobs upon giving birth and only return to work, often on a part-time basis, when their children start school. Only 55 percent of all Japanese women work, compared with 62 percent in the United States.
"Those countries with support for child rearing generally maintain the percentage of women in the labour force, and in the end, more women decide to have babies if they don't have to lose their jobs," Inoguchi said.