Paper short abstract:

Prime Minister Kishida recently announced that he will take a huge step for drastic expansions of childcare support programs. This paper analyzes the party politics over childcare policies in Japan since the 2000s, with special attention to the parties’ ideological stance on gender and families.

Paper long abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the party politics over childcare policies in Japan since the 2000s, with special attention to the parties’ ideological stance on gender and families.

Japanese governments have implemented various measures to counter the declining birthrates since the 1990s, but they have not achieved much successes. The news of a further decrease in the number of childbirths of the previous year during Covid-19 pandemic seems to have further devastated political actors. In the press conference at the beginning of new year, Prime Minister Kishida announced that his administration will take a huge step for drastic expansions of childcare support programs. Kishida’s statement revitalized debates in and outside the Diet over desired childcare policies and their impacts on people’s decision-making for having children.

Policy discussions regarding childcare support programs, including provisions of childcare services and cash benefits for families with children, contain many issues. The author puts focus on gender dimensions of childcare policy debates, especially on political parties’ stance for the redistribution of childcare responsibilities between state and family, and between women and men. In some countries, competition between political parties has brought about the defamilialization of childcare (Estevez-Abe 2014), but the case was more complicated in Japan. The political rivalry between the center-right Liberal Democratic Party and the center-left Democratic Party of Japan in the 2000s put off an introduction of the universal childcare allowance. However, some of the senior LDP members seems to have changed their stances on this issue recently. Tracing the past and present debates between parties and party politicians, the paper examines the reasons behind the childcare policy developments in Japan. In particular, it traces the evolution of child care policies under the DPJ adminsitrations, namely, Hatoyama, Kan and Noda administrations as well as the LDP administartions, namely, Abe, Suga and Kishida to examine how nature of child care policies have changed among different adminsitrations.