To Get Affordable Day Care, Women Must Carefully Plan Due Date
By Akiko Yamamoto and Doug Struck, Washington Post Foreign Service
SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A20
LENGTH: 1294 words
TOKYO – Fat with child, Sakiko Wakita was getting desperate. She had to give birth by Nov. 30 — only five days away. She resorted to a folklore remedy: Down on her knees, she scrubbed furiously at her kitchen floor.
“You can come out now,” she repeated in a mantra to her unborn child.
She was scrubbing against the rigid deadline for Japan’s chronically short supply of subsidized nurseries. The deadline has put a bureaucratic timetable on the pregnancies of Japanese working women, who must try to give birth before the fall application cutoff for the next year’s class at their local nursery to get affordable day care.
It worked. On Nov. 26, the day after her cleaning frenzy, Wakita gave birth to a baby boy. She
rushed from the hospital just before the cutoff to apply for entrance for her child in the next class at a government-approved nursery.
Missing the deadline would have created a dilemma, said Wakita, 36, whose salary as a translator of technical manuals would have been siphoned off by private day care. She planned her pregnancy more than a year ahead, but each month passed with no result. Wakita’s husband, Yoshihiro, took to coming home early from work to help in the effort.
“We were running out of time and had only one month left to try,” she said. Finally, a February vacation did the trick, with only one day to spare between her due date and the application deadline.
“This is a uniquely Japanese problem. You have to plan to give birth by such-and-such day of the month or else your child will miss the slot, and you have to think so far ahead,” said Machiko Osawa, a professor of human sociology at Japan Women’s University in Tokyo. The application period for most subsidized day care lasts about a month. Japan’s publicly supported system of day care is uniformly excellent and affordable, but there are too few slots. There is a growing backlog of more than 25,000 children, and tens of thousands more don’t even get on the list.
The consequence of failing to get into the subsidized system is large.Good private nurseries can cost $ 1,500 a month, and chilling stories of abuse in unregulated day-care centers have made parents cautious.
And if they fail to get their baby in the zero-to-1 age class in the public system, parents may be permanently locked out. In successive years, class size does not enlarge much, and vacancies generally open only when a family moves away.
“If you can’t get in [the first year], you can never get in,” said Aki Fukoin, a representative of a
citizens’ group lobbying for more public nurseries. “The parents would never let go of the valuable slot they have secured.”
The day-care problem is seen as one reason women here decline motherhood, leaving Japan with one of the world’s lowest birthrates. The birthrate, in turn, is creating what may be Japan’s greatest national challenge: a projected shrinking of the population starting in 2006 that will reshape the nation.
The day-care dilemma also causes working women who elect to have children to quit their careers, even as Japan’s population decline creates a greater need for the female labor force. Only one in four women over age 15 in Japan work full time. And of those, two out of three quit when they have children, according to statistics kept by the Ministry of Health and Welfare.
“What it comes down to is that the treasure — women’s capabilities — is being left unused in
Japan,” Osawa said. “The environment for child rearing is nonexistent.”
The day-care squeeze leaves women little choice. Yukari Motohashi, 28, gave birth in February 2001, far too late for the deadline. Her salary as an accountant would hardly cover expensive private day care, and with no one else to look after her son, she had to quit her job. She now lobbies the local nursery in hopes of getting any vacancy that opens.
“I participate in every public event held by the nursery that I can, meeting the teachers, hoping that knowing me would help my child be accepted,” she said. “But it hasn’t so far. It looks like I won’t be able to go back to work for a very long time.”
The publicly supported nurseries, originally part of the welfare system and now restricted to
children of working parents, are a good deal. The cost is set according to income; in Tokyo, the greatest number of parents pay about $ 250 a month. Government subsidies are much higher. Typically, the central government pays $ 1,847 each month for every infant under 12 months old. The local government also contributes — in Tokyo, the municipality puts in an additional $ 833 per month for a typical infant’s stay in the network of publicly owned or contracted private nurseries.
That helps support nurseries that often have only nine babies in each year’s class, watched over by three certified teachers, a nurse and a cook who gives the children a hot lunch. Regular health inspections are conducted by a physician. The staff ratio changes for older children, but few private, unsubsidized nurseries can match the care.
“I have seen other nurseries in my neighborhood, but they were terrible,” said Yoshimi Nojima, 35, an administrator at a lawyers’ association. “There is no playground, and there is no space. Beds occupied the whole nursery. It was a place to sleep and be fed, rather than a place to play.”
Recent abuse cases also have made parents leery of day care outside the government system. Last year, allegations that negligence at a chain of unapproved nurseries caused the deaths of 20 children over a period of 19 years led to manslaughter charges against two executives at the chain.
They are now on trial. In Yamato city, southwest of Tokyo, the owner of another unregulated
private nursery, Smile Mum Yamato Room, was sentenced to a 20-year prison term in June for the deaths of two young children and the serious injury of four others from physical abuse in 1999 and 2000.
The government has recognized the shortfall in its public system, and has plans to increase the number of slots at government-approved nurseries by 150,000 by the end of fiscal 2004.
“We are trying to decrease the number of children on a waiting list,” said an official at the Welfare Ministry who declined to be identified. But he said new nurseries bring a flood of women who want to get back into the workforce.
“The more we increase capacity, the more demands are awakened,” he said. “And we cannot
support those nurse-ries that do not meet the quality requirements. We have a responsibility to the public.”
Critics say bureaucratic over-regulation and caution have made the government slow to expand the network of 22,272 government-approved nurseries.
“Up until now, regulations basically prohibited private companies to participate in the [subsidized nursery] market,” leaving the field mostly to government-owned facilities, said Osawa, the professor. Local governments have been reluctant to spend money building new ones and hiring teachers. For private nurseries, complex rules limit how the sub-sidies can be spent. The money cannot go to rent, for example, a major operating expense for a private company.
There are calls for deregulation to enlarge the system of affordable day care, Osawa said. But
until that happens, mothers such as Nojima will be quietly plotting and planning.
“You’re driven into a corner,” Nojima said. Last year, as she contemplated pregnancy, she found herself searching for information on ovulation cycles in a society where open discussion of conception issues still makes people squea-mish.
“I went to bookstores and furtively flipped through books on the topic. I was reading and thinking, ‘Aha, I see,’ ” said Nojima. “If you want to continue to work, you have no choice but to plan. If you don’t get a slot, you are in a pinch.”