“In reality, marriage and child-rearing don’t cost that much, but when the media touts the costs, young people feel it’s too much trouble. This is why the annual income for marriage and child-rearing is inflated.”

This is what singles researcher Kazuhisa Arakawa said in a column titled “Is marriage an impossible game?” published in the Tokyo Shimbun on the 9th.

According to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare’s Basic Survey on Living Conditions, the annual income of households with children in 2010 was about 6.58 million yen. By contrast, it has risen to about 8.12 million yen in 2022. This gives us a glimpse into the reality that only wealthy people are getting married and having children. Arakawa points out that the majority of people with a household annual income of around 5 million yen are still below that amount, and that this is a big problem.

I sometimes hear people say that “it costs tens of millions of yen to send one child to college.” If it really costs that much, even people who are reasonably wealthy would hesitate to get married or have children. As the title of the column says, it starts to seem like an impossible game.

If we are serious about halting population decline, each woman will have to give birth to three or four children, but when you think about the financial aspects, this is nothing more than a pipe dream.
First, we need to take measures to broadly liberalize marriage and childbirth, which have become luxuries for the rich. By doing so, people who want to get married will be able to do so more easily.
To do this, we need to clearly show the costs of marriage and child-rearing. We need to stop exaggerating and hyping things up, and calculate the costs necessary to live a bare minimum life. If there is still a sense of burden, we need to carefully examine what the burden is and how it is, and the government will provide support in that area. If possible, we should aim to get to a level where it is not necessary for both spouses to work. In other words, we need to return things to their original state.

If people realize that they can get married and raise children without spending too much money, more people, especially the younger generation, will dream of getting married and raising children, which will lead to measures to combat the declining birthrate. (Kitajima Kei)

※Translating Japanese articles into English with AI