[Japanese chanting]
[Narrator:] Bustling Japan, one of the most crowded places on Earth,
is unique in Asia.
Japan is industrial, urban, literate, prosperous.
Japan is a modern nation.
[Chanting]
[The Population Problem]
[JapanAnswer in the Orient]Answer in the Orient
will examine how the people of this nation,
without enough land to supply all of its need, without enough food,
although its farmers are among the most successful on the globe,
with too few natural resources for its burgeoning industries,
with some of the world's largest and fastest-growing cities,
how the people of this crowded island nation
solved the menace of runaway population
and so gave themselves the rewards of mid-20th century life.
[Music]
Japan is the first Asian nation to do so in this century,
the only Asian nation to do so,
and the only nation in history to do so in such a short period of time.
For many reasons, it was imperative for the Japanese people to limit their population growth rate.
Japan's 98 million people are packed into a narrow 1,500-mile string of islands,
an area the size of California,
less than five percent of the land mass of the United States
for a population half as large as this country's.
Because there is little land for cultivation,
Japan has always turned to the sea for almost all of its protein.
Japanese fishermen, following ancient ways,
fish coastal and domestic waters for mostof their massive catch.
For the rest, modern factory ships go thousands of miles,
processing their haul as it is brought aboard.
But the sea cannot supply this populous nation's total needs.
To survive, Japan must exploit every natural advantage:
its hills, its mountains, its plains, its valleys,
its rivers.
With only fifteen percent of the land fit for cultivation,
even the rugged hillsides, soil most other nations would not farm,
must be used.
The lowlands are used for rice, the precious mainstay of the Japanese people.
Intensive cultivation of very small wheat farms
and heavy use of chemicals
brings the Japanese farmer higher yields per acre than his American counterpart.
However, scarcity of land keeps Japanese production far below population needs.
20% of Japan's food still must be imported.
Each year, 700,000 men, women, and children replaced by mechanization and lured by the promise of greater reward
flow to the cities.
Migration from the farm to the city
is one of the marks of a heavily industrialized society.
Tokyo, the largest and most chaotic sprawl in history,
now has more than ten million people.
And still they come, nearly 60,000 each month, choking cities
in search of a place in the country's burgeoning industries.
It is Japan's enormous industrial progress
combined with population control
that keeps her economic growth far ahead of population increases.
Nowhere is Japan's economic power more apparent
than in shipbuilding.
[Music]
Among Japan's vessels are giant tankers bigger than aircraft carriers,
the largest vessels ever made by a man.
[Music]
Sophisticated industries involving precision manufacture by skilled and educated workers
have created much of the industrial success.
Japan has been able to compete as an industrial power
largely because her labor force is almost 100%literate,
one of the highest literacy rates in the world,
with immense technical skills.
However, for a major industrial giant,
Japan has remarkably poor natural resources.
60% of its industrial materials comes from foreign ports.
To succeed, Japanese industry must export.
With exports increasing to three times the world average,
Japanese trade is leading the nation to new prosperity.
Productivity has been rising sharply, as have earnings.
While still low by US standards,
per capita income has doubled in the last decade.
It is by far the highest in Asia.
National wealth is the greatest in Japanese history.
[Japanese speaking]
[Narrator:] Older people have accepted the fruits of the post-war years
but have been slow to reconcile themselves to the accompanying social changes.
The shattering effects of this urban society
should not have been totally unexpected
since the Japanese have been building in this direction for nearly a century.
And the story of Japan's population control miracle
has even earlier beginnings.
Under a rigidly fixed social order,
there were eighteen million people in this island nation when the Tokugawa shogunate was established in 1603.
Peasants were important.
The agricultural economy rested on them.
Priests and the very powerful samurai
were atop the feudal social order.
Merchants, traders, and bankers were considered unproductive and useless citizens.
By the 1630s, fear of European colonizers turned the nation inward.
Under government encouragement, agriculture,
the continuing basis of the economy, expanded.
And the population increased
from eighteen million at the start of the 17th century to about 30 million in the middle of the 18th,
an increase of 75% in 150 years.
This isolated, limited, land-hungry agricultural nation had reached its population limit.
It could support only about 30 million people.
The birth rate was high,
but the traditional levelers,
poverty, malnutrition, famine, disease,
kept the death rate high.
And people found other ways to balance population.
Often, younger sons were discouraged from marrying.
Some used folk methods of contraception.
Infanticide was common.
Upper classes used abortion.
The traditional use of abortion as a legitimate and moral method of family control
has assisted in Japan's control of modern population growth.
During the 18th and 19th centuries,
the merchants gained greater control over the economy,
especially in the cities.
Dutch traders brought news of the Industrial Revolution
and of the great political and scientific changes in the West.
In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry demanded and received a limited treaty.
A more ambitious treaty calling for trade was signed in 1858.
Japan's doors opened.
In the last century of Tokugawa rule,
the population had stabilized itself at 30 million people.
[Music]
[Explosion]
Western strength pointed up the weakness of the Tokugawa regime.
[Music]
[Horses neighing]
The shogunate slowly crumbled.
In 1868, the enthronement of the young emperor Meiji
began a 44-year reign that would carry Japan to world power.
His advisors were impressed by Western military strength.
His empress gave attention to the farmers.
The government leaned heavily on the peasant for tax revenue.
She supported the new policy of compulsory education.
Japan would soon need a literate workforce.
The Western world became Japan's school.
[Music]
Japan was becoming a modern industrial state.
The government supported industrial expansion,
developed new systems of transportation and communications,
encouraged ever-increasing trade.
As a result, better farming increased food supplies.
Modern medicine cut the death rate.
Standards of living improved.
What had been a stabilized population
by 1898 zoomed up ten million, a 33% increase in 30 years.
Japan lacked almost every necessary resource to meet the needs of the growing population.
The militarists said they had the answer:
[Gunfire]
expansion.
Formosa and the Pescadores.
[Military drumming]
All of Korea.
A foothold in North China.
[Military drumming]
For the first time, but not the last,
population pressure was an excuse for military conflicts.
[Music]
In spite of her fast-moving armies, Japan's population pressures kept increasing.
By 1920, her population was 60 million,
a 100% increase in 50 years.
The militarists wanted still more territory.
[Music]
The seizure of Manchuria in 1931 led to a Japanese gamble for the whole Asian Pacific area.
The American fleet at Pearl Harbor was the only obstacle.
[Planes flying, explosions]
The first six months beginning in 1941 were fantastically successful.
Japanese armies overran the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaya,
Singapore, Burma, the Dutch East Indies,
strategic islands from Guadalcanal
in the South Pacific to the Aleutians in the North.
For a moment, the Japanese Empire was one of the largest in history.
But the tide turned in 1942.
Allied forces began pushing back,
finally bringing the war to Japan itself.
Thrown back on its own ruined islands,
threatened with famine,
the nation was crushed and demoralized.
[Music]
For the first time in history, Japan was occupied by a foreign army.
The people expected a vengeance that never came.
In those desperate years, the conquerors supplied the margin of survival.
To aggravate the problem,
more than six million troops and civilians returned.
[Music]
A massive baby boom followed.
The emperor renounced any claim to personal divinity.
The old order was gone.
Remaining was a demoralized and conquered nation,
the skeleton of what had been a mighty industrial giant,
and a frightening population problem.
In the post-war baby boom, the birth rate soared
while peace and medicine cut the death rate to new lows.
Yearly population growth tripled from half a million in 1946 to a million and a half in 1947.
But in 1948 and 1949, the birth rate dropped slightly,
then sharply in the '50s.
And by 1957, the birth rate was half that of ten years before.
In a single decade, the Japanese people completed their demographic transition,
the changeover from the high birth and death rates of the past
to the low birth and death rates which characterize today's modern nations.
How had they done it?
The heart of the answer lies in the deeply personal decision of parents
to limit the size of their families.
There were other catalysts.
Under the leadership of General Douglas MacArthur,
sweeping programs of social, political, and economic reform were instituted in the first post-war years.
Drastic land redistribution programs led to remarkable increases in food production.
[Music]
The people became sovereign over their government.
[Music]
Women had the right to vote, legal equality,
and equal opportunities in education.
As a result, women today enjoy a new independence
and are able to pursue education and careers before marrying.
[Music]
The average age at marriage for women is almost 25,
nearly ten years higher than in India.
Later marriages cut years from a woman's childbearing life.
Because of the extensive educational demands made upon Japanese men,
the average age for men at marriage is 27.
[Music]
Newly married couples are not anxious to give up participation in Japan's good life.
The participation built around two salaries in a marriage is beginning.
Breaking from tradition,
newlyweds strive to have the privacy of their own apartment,
belongings of their choice.
[Music]
Couples with a new sense of independence delay having children,
often until the husband is in a sound enough financial position to guarantee continuing involvement in the good life,
cutting additional years from a woman's childbearing potential.
[Music]
Japanese parents, themselves well-educated,
know the importance of an education in an industrialized society.
They also realize that in such a society,
children are an economic burden for many years.
[Music]
With the growth of a more humanistic approach to life,
children have attained a great deal of value as individuals.
[Children playing]
Even little girls.
Once past elementary school age,
children begin involvement in one of the world's most competitive educational systems.
[Music]
Although the great majority of Japanese children complete high school,
acceptance to further education is not guaranteed
because of the great numbers who want to continue
and the very high standard set for entrance into higher education.
But Japanese youngsters know the value of higher education in an industrialized society,
and many of them, like this boy,
attend special cram schools in an effort to meet academic requirements
and to pass entrance examinations.
That education is essential to the well-being of an industrialized nation is apparent to Japanese parents.
As a result, the necessity of adequate education for children and its costs
are an important factor in controlling family size.
[Japanese speaking]
[Narrator:] Post-war industrial development has been phenomenal,
pushing the economy upward at the highest rates of any advanced nation.
And since the war, industrialists have been taking a deep interest in fertility control.
As a part of industry-sponsored programs,
health and welfare specialists go to workers' homes.
[Music]
Practical nurses bring advice on child care and family health.
[Music]
Some industry-sponsored programs even show wives how to shop more economically.
[Music]
Gradually, these programs break down shyness,
until at neighborhood meetings, birth control instruction begins.
Here, wives are urged to substitute contraception for abortion.
As a result, the national abortion rate is on the decline.
Though, with almost a million abortions each year,
it is still one of Japan's most common ways to prevent birth.
[Music]
When their contraception practices fail,
Japanese women can discuss abortion with a qualified doctor.
Since abortion is traditional, people have no moral or religious qualms about its use.
[Music]
The government discusses it openly in magazines, newspapers, and films.
As this government film shows,
there were often distressing results in the rapidly rising number of illegal abortions in the desperate post-war years.
[Music]
[Siren]
Japan therefore passed the Eugenics Protection Law,
making the best modern medical techniques available to women
who, for economic or medical reasons, want an abortion.
[Japanese speaking]
[Narrator:] Today, this young woman can find sympathetic attention
from a doctor who promotes contraception as a substitute for abortion.
The doctor explains the facts of abortion.
She may even advise this woman to have her baby on emotional grounds.
[Japanese speaking]
[Narrator:] The doctor has helped the couple understand their problem.
Their decision can be the most important of their young lives.
A child will certainly change their way of life.
A child will mean loss of the wife's income,
loss of their apartment, loss of their new freedoms,
and an eventual return to living with their parents.
[Japanese speaking]
[Music]
[Narrator:] The choice is difficult.
[Music]
The literate Japanese people are aware of the new problems their highly mobile industrial and urban society is presenting.
And they are as aware of the difficulties of rearing large families in such a society.
[Children laughing]
[Music][Children playing]
Aided by interested industrialists, by a wise government, and by their own educated choices,
they are deciding to keep families small.
In China, India, indeed almost across the globe,
population is expected to double by the end of this century.
Not in Japan,
where births are below long-term replacement needs.
[Music]
The Japanese answer has demonstrated that a people
not inhibited by religious or moral restrictions,
a people acting in its own interest and the interest of its children
can bring about population control
and can do so in a relatively short period of time.
[Music]
The results of Japan's answer are greater opportunities for the individual
and a fuller life for everyone.
[Music]
[Produced by In-Sight Productions, Inc.Charles Vaughan, President]
[Writer: Edward Pfister]
[Narrator: Ron Allen]
[Produced under a grant from Cordelia S. May]
[Hour version produced in association with United States Productions, Inc., Francis C. Thayer, President]
[Filmed with the cooperation of International Motion Picture Co., Tokyo]
[Music][Credits]
[Music]
[Announcer:] This is NET, the National Educational Television network.