Plan to hire more foreign housekeepers no easy chore, say industry players
The role of housekeepers has come under the spotlight as the government looks to them to provide working mothers with help at home as one way to prop up the nation's dwindling workforce. Under the government's plan, visa requirements have been relaxed in two regions ...
Water, water everywhere in Japan, but fewer people to pay for it
Water is relatively abundant in Japan, but there are less people around to pay for the infrastructure that processes it and delivers it to homes.
The Abe administration is looking at reforming the employment insurance scheme to get more senior citizens into the workforce, but beefing up other components of the social welfare net would be more effective.
The government distributed inaccurate sex education material to high school teachers in a misguided attempt to raise the national birthrate.
Japan's medical expenditures are rising at an unsustainable pace and everyone is going to have to pitch in to keep costs down.
Can art bring people back to Japan's depopulated islands?
I've seen island revitalization projects come and go, but the idea of an NPO riding on the coattails of a successful art trend in the area strikes me as having some promise.
Land prices are generally on the upswing, but the gap between urban and rural areas is growing worse.
The government's policy on housing should veer away from encouraging new construction and focus more on developing the market for secondhand houses.
Raising the minimum wage in each prefecture will help achieve broad-based pay increases, but could also cause difficulties for small and medium-size businesses.
Japan's silver-driven pacifism
The declining population threatens to push Japan off the world stage in the coming decades.
The number of babies born in Japan in the January-to-June period rose 2.4 percent from a year earlier to 508,802, government data shows, suggesting it would lead to the first annual increase in five years. The country's population has been declining as the proportion of ...
Facing depopulation, rural towns turn to online cram schools
One of the biggest concerns for families living in depopulated areas may be a lack of educational opportunities for their children that larger cities can offer. In an effort to discourage families from moving out of those rural towns and villages, local governments are offering ...
