IN 2014, a local official in Aichi prefecture set out a daring proposal. Tomonaga Osada suggested that the authorities could distribute secretly punctured condoms to young married couples, who would then get to work boosting the birth rate. His unorthodox ploy won few supporters, yet it reflected growing concern about Japan’s demographic plight. In 2014, just over 1 million babies were born, far fewer than the number needed to maintain the population, which is expected to drop from 127 million to around 87 million by 2060. Why are young Japanese so loth to procreate? The spiral of demographic decline is spinning faster as the number of women of child-bearing age falls. Some 500 towns across the country are expected to disappear by 2040 as young women migrate to bigger cities. The workforce is already shrinking, endangering future growth. In recent years governments have embarked on a plethora of schemes to encourage childbearing, including a “women’s handbook” to educate young females on the high and low points of their fertility, and state-sponsored matchmaking events.

The chief reason for the dearth of births is the decline of marriage. Fewer people are opting to wed, and those who do are getting married later in life. At least a third of young women aim to become full-time housewives, yet they struggle to find men who can support a traditional family. In better economic times potential suitors had permanent jobs as part of Japan’s “lifetime employment” system. Now many of them have to rely on temporary or part-time work. Other women shun marriage and children because Japan’s old-fashioned corporate culture, together with a dire shortage of child care, forces them to give up their careers if they have children. Finally, young people are bound by strict social codes. Only around 2% of babies are born outside marriage (compared with 30–50% in most of the rich world), which means that as weddings plummet, so do births. And even for those who do start families, the rising cost of child-rearing often imposes a de facto one-child policy.

There is little the government can do directly to boost productivity in the bedroom. Yet labour-market reforms could make a difference to the birth rate in the long term. If companies gave more protection to new, young hires and reduced the privileges of other employees, young couples would have a more stable basis on which to marry and raise families. The government of Shinzo Abe has talked about such steps, but has shied away from taking them. Instead Mr Abe is acting to help women combine careers with child-rearing. Many demographers reckon it is already too late to lift Japan’s birth rate, now at 1.41 children per woman. The eventual answer, they say, will be even more shocking to Japanese society than sabotaged prophylactics: mass immigration.

Dig deeper:

Women’s lowly status in the Japanese workplace has barely improved in decades (March 2014)

Japan, the incredible shrinking country (March 2014)

2014 could be the year that Asia's birth rate falls below the replacement ratio (November 2013)

Update: This blog post has been amended to remove the news peg.