In baby-scarce Japan, marriage is delivered to door

By Chisa Fujioka

FUKUI, Japan (Reuters) - Stepping into her neighbor's house for green tea and red bean cake, Ikuko Juryo pulls out a photograph of a young bachelor.

"He's a good marriage prospect," she says. "Works for the local government. His family might own a house."

Proud to be a busybody matchmaker, Juryo belongs to a 200-member women's group in Fukui which makes door-to-door visits to single people's homes in a bid to marry them off and raise the birth rate of the sleepy prefecture in western Japan.

Subsidized by the local government, the matchmakers have helped around 50 couples tie the knot in the past year.

They are also credited with helping Fukui become the only one of Japan's 47 prefectures to raise its fertility rate -- the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime -- in 2005, just as the nationwide count hit a record-low of 1.26. By contrast, Fukui's fertility rate was 1.47 in 2005.

Juryo's travails -- from knocking on doors to organizing matchmaking parties -- reflect the hurdles Japan faces turning its birth rate around in the face of a rapidly ageing population.

Japan's population of around 128 million is set to decline in coming years as the number of elderly far exceed the number of births. Japan is home to the world's highest proportion of old people, with 20 percent of the total population aged 65 or older.

Shoko Mitsunari, the group's octogenarian head, says getting people to marry and have children is no easy task, an unthinkable situation when she was young and most women married by age 20.

"People need to know that if you don't marry and have kids, the country will simply die away," she said, tagging along on the matchmaking visits. "It's not just a problem for the individual."

WORK AND FAMILY

Academics trace the root of Japan's falling birth rate to the economy's rapid growth in the 1970s, when more women went to universities and began to work full-time.

Since then, an increasing number of women have delayed having babies or opted out of marriage and child-bearing altogether.

The phenomenon is not unique to Japan. But the country has lagged behind other nations such as Sweden, the United States and France in finding ways to help parents balance work and family, said Makoto Atoh, a professor at Waseda University in Tokyo.

"The government is often blamed for not doing enough, but that's not necessarily the case, when you look at how it has shortened work days and built day-care centers," Atoh said. "It's more an issue of people not making use of the measures in place."

Long working hours for ambitious career men and women as well as late-night business meetings put a damper on family life. The high prices of child care services is also a disincentive.