Japan is experiencing a birth crisis and is already considering a dystopian future: banning women over 25 from marrying
Japan is experiencing a huge birth crisis that is also affecting the labor shortage. The country’s job prospects are not looking bright, so the Japanese government wants to attract foreign workers. It has proposed measures to make it easier for retirees to continue working, it is encouraging flexible work environments and even Microsoft has talked about its plans. There are fears that there will not be people to code their software.
Well, in this context, Naoki Hyakuta, one of the founders of the Japanese Conservative Party, uses her YouTube channel to launch dystopian ideas about other possible scenarios in the country, which have been very controversial and offensive.
Among other issues, the conservative politician used the Google video social network to talk about hypothetical cases in which women in Japan over the age of 25 would be banned from marrying or would have to have their uteruses removed when they reach the age of 25-30 (a procedure called a hysterectomy).
In a program on his YouTube channel (where he has nearly half a million subscribers) broadcast a few days ago about the declining birth rate, Naoki Hyakuta, a novelist and leader of Japan's Conservative Party, said there is a hypothetical idea, which she personally does not support, that women "have their wombs removed when they are over 30."
In this world, which he proposes as “science fiction,” “women cannot attend university from the age of 18” and “women over the age of 25 will not be allowed by law to marry.” With these extremes, women will be encouraged to have children at a very young age.
Two days later, in a speech in Nagoya, Hyakuta called the comments extremely bitter, saying, "I will retract and apologize because there are people who found them unpleasant." Hyakuta also apologized for them on his social media platform X the same day, saying it was "undoubtedly very harsh."
When Kaori Arimoto, a high-ranking member of her party who joined her on the YouTube show, pointed out that her comments were inappropriate, even if framed as a science fiction story, Hyakuta responded: “I was explaining about the time limit (a woman faces when giving birth) in a simple way. Which means that women should not have children after the age of 30.”
The Conservative Party of Japan, founded by Hyakuta in 2023, won three seats in the lower house election on Oct. 27, meeting the requirement to become a national political party by winning more than 2 percent of the vote. Hyakuta has previously courted controversy, for example by claiming that the 1937 Nanjing Massacre by Japanese troops in China never happened.
We must also remember that Japan has a painful past in this regard: between 1948 and 1996, women were sterilized in order to "prevent the birth of inferior offspring... and protect the life and health of the mother" by force and without consent. These details were revealed thanks to an investigation that began in 2020.
The Eugenics Protection Act was passed in 1948 and allowed doctors to sterilize people with or without their consent. If a woman had certain diseases, she was sterilized to prevent her from having offspring who would inherit the disease. These included albinism, muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, deafness, missing a hand or foot, and more.