Abstract
The Politics of Life and Death in Japan: Exploration through the Family-State Nexus
TAKEDA, Hiroko, Graduate School of Law, Nagoya University, takeda.hiroko.a5@f.mail.nagoya-u.ac.jp
In June 2025, the total fertility rate was again listed as the top news topic in Japan. The 2024 TFR recorded 1.15, the lowest since the postwar national government started collecting and analysing fertility data in 1947. The number of childbirths in 2024 was approximately 686K, again, the lowest since 1899, indicating that the size of the national population has shrunk much faster than the National Institute for Population and Social Security Research estimated only two years ago. While the issue of fertility decline, which was first promoted to the prioritised national political agenda in the early 1990s, appears to be exacerbating, the number of suicides among young people is steadily increasing in one of the fastest ageing societies in the world. All these statistical facts suggest that Japan, as a country, is rapidly losing its capacity to nurture the next generation of its population, despite a series of policy initiatives aiming at bumping up fertility rates implemented over the last 30 years.
Referring to the theoretical discussions on biopolitics and necropolitics, the paper explores how and why the Japanese people, particularly the young, today remain hesitant in forming their families and committing to reproduction, or even appear to be drawn to death. To do so, the paper examines the family-state nexus operating in the current institutional environment, through which individuals are located within the framework of the family in a gendered manner. This exercise enables us to articulate the Japanese state’s approach to the politics of life and death.
Short Bio
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Name |
Prof. Dr. Takeda Hiroko |
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Position |
Professor |
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Affiliation |
Nagoya University, Graduate School of Law Department of the Combined Graduate Program in Law and Political Science Core Law and Political Science |
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Research focus |
Humanities & Social Sciences, Political Sociology, Gender Studies & Japanese Studies, governance & gender/the family/reproduction, biopolitics, governmentality, gender & political economy, political discourse analysis, risk discourses |
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relevant Publications |
Takeda, Hiroko. 2023. „Roundtable: Is Neoliberalism Now an Exhausted Model?“ In: Global Political Economy, Oxford University Press: 71–78. Takeda, Hiroko. 2023. „The Crisis of Reproduction and the State: The Case of Japan.“ The Annals of the Japan Association for Comparative Politics: Crisis and the State 25: 111–139. Takeda, Hiroko (2022): “Jendā kara pandemikku-ka no namaseiji, shiseiji o kangaeru. Gendai Nihon no ba’ai”, Nenpō seijigaku 73 (1), pp. 15–34. Takeda, Hiroko. 2021. “Authoritarian Populism in Everyday Life. The Discursive Politics of Demographic and Lifestyle Changes in Japan”, Sebastian Maslow, Christian Wirth (Eds.): Crisis Narratives, Institutional Change, and the Transformation of the Japanese State. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 51–76. Takeda, Hiroko; Williams, Mark (Eds.) (2021): Routledge handbook of contemporary Japan. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. |
