Families in the U.S. and around the world are having fewer children as people make profoundly different decisions about their lives. NPR's series Population Shift: How Smaller Families Are Changing the World explores the causes and implications of this trend.
AKITA, Japan — Young men in traditional festival clothes balance heavy bamboo poles up to 40 feet high on their heads, hands, hips and shoulders. Crossbars on the poles carry dozens of candlelit paper lanterns.
Part ritual, part festival and part competition, kanto is a centuries-old display of strength, skill and culture unique to Akita Prefecture, in northern Japan's Tohoku region.
Traditionally, only men are allowed to touch the poles. Women play flutes and drums.
Kanto practitioners believe that women cannot participate because, according to Japan's Shinto religion, women's blood from menstruation and childbirth is considered impure for the purpose of religious rituals.
Some Japanese women accept Kanto's gender divisions as part of the culture, or simply refrain from criticizing them. College student Mayaka Ogawa, for example, says, "We can't really argue against tradition and religious reasons."
Kanto is emblematic of both Akita's cultural splendor and its conservative rural society.
And Akita itself is emblematic of Japan's 21st century demographic challenges: It has the most aged population (39% were over age 65 in 2024), the lowest birth rate and the fastest declining population of Japan's 47 prefectures, according to government figures. Gender inequality is accelerating depopulation in rural areas like this.
Rural women flee gender inequality
A Japanese government report on inequality published in June found that 27% of young women want to leave their hometowns, compared to 15% of young men — and rigid gender roles in rural society are prompting young women to vote with their feet.
The survey shows that most women move to the cities in search of better employment opportunities — but there's a gender angle to that, too. Widespread expectations that women will prioritize housework and childcare also diminish young women's educational prospects, motivating them to leave rural areas.
In rural communities, "women are stuck in temporary or part-time jobs and only men get promoted. Women don't want to work in these places, so they move to Tokyo," says Chuo University sociologist Masahiro Yamada.
The problem is persistent, he says, because "middle-aged and older men in rural areas don't want to change the current situation of discrimination against women."
While last month's selection of Sanae Takaichi as Japan's first female prime minister breaks an important glass ceiling, she advocates a conservative, traditional view of gender roles.
Japanese women's political empowerment ranks 125th out of 148 countries in the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Report for 2025.
A study last year found that 744 Japanese municipalities, or 43% of the total, mostly in rural areas, are at risk of disappearing because their proportion of women of childbearing age are expected to drop by half by mid-century.
But the effects of depopulation in Japan are already impossible to miss. Hundreds of thousands of jobs go unfilled due to labor shortages. Millions of homes stand vacant or abandoned.
Making women's voices heard
While the exodus of rural women continues, some women stay put or return to rural areas to try to improve them.
Ren Yamamoto wanted to make young rural women's voices heard. So the 26-year-old resident of Nirasaki, a city in Yamanashi Prefecture — home to Mount Fuji and some 80 miles west of Tokyo — taped 100 interviews with rural women and started her own YouTube channel.
Many of her interviewees told her "when they go back to their hometowns, they're asked: 'when are you getting married? when are you going to have children?' and they're sick of being forced into such a role," she says.
Japan's public broadcaster NHK reported on her project. Earlier this year, then-Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba invited her to meet with him.
"Policies to support women have been centered on childcare and marriage, without addressing the reasons why women leave rural areas," Yamamoto told Ishiba. "Policymakers haven't faced the fact that women have their own choices to make. We feel like we're seen as baby-making machines."
Ishiba told Yamamoto he was trying to improve the situation, but it was tough because local officials are overwhelmingly middle-aged men.
The government searches for policy fixes
Japan's government has pointed out that the issues of gender equality and falling birthrate are inseparably linked. Central and local authorities are trying various policies to address both issues.
Some local governments, including Tokyo's and Akita's, serve as matchmakers to try to increase marriages and births.
"I hate that," exclaims Mayaka Ogawa, the Akita college student. "It almost comes across as women can't do it for themselves." She adds: "Women are starting to awaken to the fact that they don't really need to form a family in order to be fulfilled."
On a recent weekend, a handful of mostly middle-aged women attended a lecture in Akita, where an "assertiveness trainer" coached them on how to convince husbands to help more with housework and childcare. A poster for the event shows drawings of smiling men ironing laundry and cradling children.
"Even though so many people across Japan are putting in so much effort [toward gender equality], we still find ourselves in a situation where progress is painfully slow," says Naoko Tani, director of the Akita Prefectural Central Gender Equality Center, which hosted the lecture.
Gnawing unease and pessimism
Some Akita women say they suffer from moya moya, a vague, gnawing sense that things aren't right, but they can't put their finger on it. Taboos against challenging gender roles and male authority thicken the fog of moya moya.
Tani says she too once suffered from this confusion, but "through learning about things from a gender perspective, there were moments when things suddenly clicked for me — when I thought, 'Ah, so this is what it's about.' And at those times, the realization moved me to tears."
Others are just moved to leave and not look back.
"Akita is often called an isolated island on land," says high school student Yukina Oguma, whose family are hereditary managers of a Buddhist temple in Akita.
She plans to go to college in another prefecture.
Asked what she would do if she were told or expected to stay in Akita and take over the temple, she replies, "I would run away."
Some women are pessimistic about improving gender equality in Akita anytime soon.
"Let Akita be depopulated. There is no way of stopping it, honestly speaking," argues college student Miwa Sawano. "They won't realize they have a problem until the women leave."
Chie Kobayashi contributed to this report in Tokyo and Yamanashi and Akita Prefectures.
Copyright 2025 NPR
