According to news reports, recently there was a preview screening of the movie Juno, starring Ellen Page, in Nagatacho, with a special talk by Diet member Noda Seiko. Noda has famously written brutally honest books about her own experience with fertility treatment and has attempted to make a name for herself by offering new policy ideas to boost Japan’s declining birthrate.
Noda drew attention to how differently teen pregnancy and childbirth are depicted in Japanese and American popular culture. She claimed that a story like this would be treated in a serious, somber light in Japan (and would be a tearjerker, to be sure!), so she was suprised at how drastically different Juno portrayed these big decisions. Although I’ve only seen a few episodes of the popular Japanese television drama about a 14-year old teenage mother, the tone was indeed generally serious.
Noda also drew some comparisons between Japan and other advanced industrial countries, particularly the United States, where she studied abroad as a high school student over 30 years ago. She recalled sometimes seeing students who were pregnant or pushing baby carriages to school, pointing out that teenage pregnancy is by no means a “new” issue in the United States. She claimed that in the United States, people are more likely to accept and value new life, even when it is brought into the world by a physically and economically immature teenage girl.
Noda also tied discussion of the movie into the declining birthrate issue, her signature policy area, by pointing out that Japan currently lacks the infrastructure to accommodate foster and adoptive parents sufficiently. She pointed out that more married women are working these days, but many couples still need some economic help before they will be able to have children — if the husband doesn’t receive an expected bonus at work, for example, they may have to rethink whether they want to have another child. Echoing a common problem framing of the declining birthrate, Noda also argued that men, rather than women, play the leading role in the declining birthrate problem because even if the birth of a new child floods them with feelings of joy, they still end up inevitably consumed by work. She hopes that Japan, which lags other countries in this area, updates its childrearing support systems and institutions to accommodate these new and changing situations.
I looked up some Japanese blogs to see if there was any reaction to the event, and a few young women reported attending the event, being surprised at how personable and engaging Noda Seiko was, and remarking that they were starting to take more interest in both politics and the declining birthrate issue. Another comment that came up a few times was reiteration of the sentiment that teenage pregnancy would never be depicted this way in Japan. The movie will be released in June nationwide.
November 15, 2008 at 7:09 am
Teenage pregnancy is continuously declining in America since the introduction of contraceptives in 1990. However, despite the fact that the teenage pregnancy rate is experiencing a steady decline, the U.S. teenage pregnancy rate still remains to be among the top among all the industrialized nations around the globe.
In fact, teenage pregnancy problems in America continue to be one of the most alarming teen problem in the Western world. According to the most recent national health surveys of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP), more than one million teenagers of the United States become pregnant every year. Of this one million, almost twenty percent are giving birth to their first child.