Kyoto, Japan, 20 January

Are you confident about your well-being after retirement? Are you able to find out how your pension tax is presently being used? And is your company flexible enough to let you take holidays or allow you to come back after childbirth? Answers to these questions need to be found if society is to be healthy in 20 years.
It is estimated that the number of people aged 65 and over in the European Union will increase by 40 million in 2030, the population between the ages of 15 to 64 will decline by 20.8 million. This indicates that two work-aged people will be needed to support each pensioner.
The gulf is wider in Japan: There will be 10.9 million of people older than 65 but a working population of 17 million – less than two people for one pensioner. This phenomenon can be called an Ageing Society, one in which there will be much more senior citizens than employed people.
A number of journalists from the EU and Japan gathered in Kyoto from 19-20 January to talk about this urgent issue at the Annual EU-Japan Journalist’s Conference.

Annual EU-Japan Journalist’s Conference: In belief

The yearly EU-Japan Journalist’s Conference is organized by Delegation of the European Commission to Japan in order to allow journalists to meet with leading figures from political, business and academic spheres and discuss issues relevant to international diplomacy. Of particular import is the relationship between the EU and Japan. The First EU-Japan Journalist’s Conference was held in 1987. It is sited alternatively in Europe and Japan, so as to stimulate journalists to stay updated about societal issues in both places. Further, the conference is an initiative to deepen mutual understanding and strengthen EU-Japanese relations .

This year of 2008 welcomed the 20th anniversary of the conference. Twenty-two journalists, six from the EU member states and 16 from Japan, gathered to discuss an issue of growing import: Ageing Society.

The previous year’s conference was held in Hakone, Japan. Journalists gathered there to talk about migration. It was an important first step, especially as Japan has been hesitant to step into the arena of immigration policy in the same way as the European countries have done. In an Ageing Society, it is crucial to increase the employed population to back up those retired. However, it became clear that Japan encounters many more challenges than some of her European counterparts, including rethinking working conditions, women’s position in working society, and (not least) its pension system. However, problems can be also found on the European continent, especially as Social Policy is a slow-moving policy field among the Community policies (largely because the EU has limited competences). In short, the Kyoto conference was a great opportunity for journalists from these two regions to gather to talk about this complicated and pressing issue.

Summary of 20th EU-Japan Journalist’s Conference

On 19 January, 2008, conference-goers gathered at the Kyoto International Conference Centre to instigate the two-day debate under the theme Meeting the Challenges of an Ageing Society.

Hugh Richardson , the head of delegation of the European Commission to Japan, has emphasized the importance of having this conference to talk about the topic that became essential to both the EU and Japan

“The time had come to focus on our experiences, problems and solutions in relation to this multi-faceted and irreversible trend in our post-industrial society,” said the ambassador, who has lived in both Europe and Japan for long periods.

Ageing Society reflects the positive aspects of greater life expectancy and at the same time a dire necessity to reform existing social models so as to reintroduce both economic efficiency and social equity in a new society.

“These changes have major implications for prosperity, living standards, and intergenerational relations,” Richardson said. “Population ageing is also a result of low fertility rate, the phenomenon which is particularly acute in Japan. The reasons for this lie partly and apparently in late access to employment, job instability, expensive housing, and lack of incentives in social infrastructure such as child care.”

Kuniko Inoguchi , a former minister of State for Gender Equality and Social Affairs in Japan, remarked on the current Japanese socio-economic situation:

“Japan today is still the second largest economy in the world, but when it comes to gender equality, it is between 40th and 50th among the major countries, and demographically we are shrinking rather rapidly.”
A woman who holds a Ph.D. who experienced both political and academic life further attested to the difficulty for woman to work at higher level in Japan.

“I am now a member of the House of Representatives and we have only 12 percent (of female) in the national assembly, so being a woman and being a politician is very difficult. (…) I come from the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), you see we have the largest number of members but we also have the biggest number of male representatives,” said Kuniko Inoguchi.

During her term as a minister serving the Koizumi government that lasted from 2001 to 2006, the cabinet installed positive measures to increase women’s participation in high-ranking decision-making stratum and to support work-life balance.

Japan had two Baby Booms after the Second World War but the third one did not occur. According to Inoguchi, the Koizumi cabinet’s measure for gender equality saw a rise in fertility rate for the first time in the last 14 years. But in coming future, due to the population greying, this rise would not be enough to support the older population.

“We (Japanese) need to focus on social policy recovery and the EU inspires us in many ways especially what kind of policies could make people happier,” said the former minister with a hope to change the current social situation in Japan.

So, if Japan was to follow the European examples, how can the EU try to brace up for Ageing Society?

Vladimir Špidla , the European Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities spoke on this topic:

“Under an Ageing Society, the market needs to be flexible and society to be inclusive. This should go along with enhanced participation of those excluded and will eventually result prosperity in a cohesive society,” said the French-speaking Czech social democrat.

The European Union has aimed to build an inclusive society under its theme of economic and social cohesion. A new Community Programme for Employment and Social Solidarity called PROGRESS was set up for the period of 2007-2013 by Decision 1672/2006/EC . This programme endeavours to build a social Europe and includes plans to confront population ageing, including such as equal employment opportunity, prohibiting gender discrimination, and improving work conditions. But the real aim of this programme is to strengthen the tie with the Member States since the EU has limited competence in the employment and social fields. The real power lies at national level. Alongside this objective, is the European Social Fund , one of the EU’s Structural Funds, which is being developed in order to reduce differences in prosperity and living standards across Member States and regions .

Moderated by Kuniko Inoguchi, discussions were held under three tracks:

Promoting greater participation in the labour market and adaptability to change

Both the EU and Japan must adjust to the changes resulting from an Ageing Society. But how can we evaluate, for instance, the current employment system?
Naohiro Yashiro, a professor of International Christian University in Japan, says that the Japanese employment system is not sustainable in an Ageing Society. For instance, Japan keeps its wage practices based on seniority, in which employees get more wages as they age. Also, occupational discrimination concerns the wage difference between highly skilled and less skilled labours is apparent. This creates a huge wage gap among middle-aged men as well as between full-timers and part-timers. In Yashiro’s view, Japan needs to build an age-free society where this seniority system no longer exists.

A British Conservative Party politician, Philip Bushill-Matthews sees the importance of the European Union adopting to the changes. “The (European) Commission can often see the long-term major trends, more clear than the member states’ governments. Speaking as a politician, I can confirm that a government tends by nature to be more pre-occupied with short-term issues to get them up through the next election, so that the long-term issues often get parked for other people,” said the member of the European Parliament.

In his view, the Commission is now acting as a facilitator to ask the questions that a national government cannot address. The Lisbon Strategy also points out the lack of job opportunities for women and older people. According to the Lisbon document, by 2010, 70 percent of women in the EU should be active in the labour market. Some countries in Scandinavia have extended child-care provisions and family-friendly working hours, but other nations have different situations from these examples.
Journalists were interested in analysing how the role of men and women was understood in each region, and whether gender inequality could be still perceived in Japanese society.

Balancing work and life

In 2002, a Japanese word, karoshi, was defined as “death brought on by overwork or job-related exhaustion” in the Oxford English Dictionary . Still today this term has not stopped appearing in Japanese newspapers. It seems that balancing work and life is remaining difficult in Japan.

Although karoshi might not be the concern in the European labour market, Janine Lescheke from European Trade Union Institute said that the current situation in Europe somewhat mirrors the situation in Japan: it has comparatively low labour market participation of women and low fertility rates, and these have negative impacts on social security financing. According to her, access to the work-life balance policies differs across education levels, occupations and sectors. Furthermore, most firms introduced a limited set of work-life balance policies, and only 3 percent of firms in Europe provide day-care services.

Dieter Weirich, a senior vice president of Corporate Communications Fraport AG, defined that work-life balance as “compatibility of career, family as well as social, cultural and private life which creates a win-win situation between employers and employees.”

Fraport AG has implemented its own work-life balance scheme allowing flexible models for work hours, supporting good health measures, and ensuring equal opportunities for women and men in training and coaching.

The main discussion point was how the current state of work-life balance in the European countries can be evaluated, and how the example of Fraport AG can be applied to other firms.

Ensuring sustainable and adequate pensions

Last year, rather shocking news was reported throughout Japan: The country of Internet Technology lost the records of at least 50 million public pension accounts . While in Japan, weblogs are primarily used for keeping personal diaries, this incident led some Japanese to speak out online . Journalists of course concerned themselves greatly with this issue, under the title of “disappeared-pension problem”.

According to Noriyasu Watanabe, a professor of Graduate School of Rissho University, Japan urgently needs to reform the current pension system by improving the quality of civil servants’ commitment to their jobs, providing Social-Fiscal numbers and establishing a European model of the Social Security Agency.

In Europe, pension systems are dealt with solely at national levels, hence differences among member states. Vesa Vihriälä, the State Under-Secretary for Economic Affairs in Finland, presented the Finnish example. According to him, the Finnish pension reform in 2005 is hard to evaluate at this still-early stage, but in the long run it is expected to bring about advantages such as fiscal sustainability - although in Finland, municipalities are the rulers of pension systems. Therefore, as demographic changes occur, some municipalities may not be able to provide the service sufficiently.
The main concern for participating journalists was to understand how the pension is dealt in Japan, and how the Finnish example could be evaluated.
Want more? Further discussion points on the issue of gender equality in the labour market

R. Tsubaki