The Students

The Classes

Kindergarten Cuts
Shifting Demographics Mean Fewer Youngsters in Class

By Austin Ramzy
Special to the Mercury News
(This story originally appeared in the San Jose Mercury News on August 8, 2002. Click here to view it on the Mercury News web site)

NAGASAKI, Japan – At the Houju Kindergarten, on the wooded grounds of a Shinto shrine, it's time for a listening exercise.

Sayuri Okamura reads to her class at the Houju kindergarten in Nagasaki. She has seen classes get smaller and smaller.

The teacher tells the class to sing, clap and dance along. To the beat of a cartoon song, 27 children in red-and-white uniforms pound their slippers on the hardwood floor, which emits a low rumble. A decade ago the floor would have thundered. Back then, there were three times as many children in this school at the base of Mount Inasa, the city's tallest peak.

In Nagasaki, the number of students is decreasing at all grade levels, but it's felt most in the city's kindergartens, said Mariko Tanisaki, an official with the Nagasaki City Board of Education. From 1994 to 2000, the number of kindergarten students in the area dropped 20 percent.

The decline is just one reflection of a major demographic shift nationwide. Fewer Japanese are having children.

Across Japan, the birth rate has declined because couples marry later in life or worry about the high cost of raising children, and more women are taking jobs. In May, the Home Affairs Ministry announced the number of children younger than 15 in Japan fell for the 21st year in a row. In the past decade, more than 600 kindergartens have closed.

Children in Japan can attend kindergarten from age 3 to 5, though it is not required. In Nagasaki, just over half the children attend one of the city's kindergartens, most of which are private, before compulsory education begins at age 6.

Now, all of the students at Houju Kindergarten easily fit into one classroom for their exercises, leaving three other classrooms vacant. The cubbyholes where they place their shoes are mostly empty, too.

"It's sad. My feeling is I want to see as many children as possible,'' said Sayuri Okamura, a 42-year-old teacher. "My hope is to raise children in a good environment. Children get stimulation from more children.''

One reason the number of children in kindergarten has dropped is that more people are sending their children to day care centers, which keep them for long hours convenient for working mothers. In the 1990s, the number of children in day care increased 8 percent in Japan. While kindergartens provide preschool education, day care centers look after children of parents who work or otherwise can't take care of them during the day.

At the Ohura Day Care Center, down the block from century-old Western-style houses in Nagasaki's former foreign concession, children take their afternoon naps on tatami mats spread across the floor. There's hardly room to walk between them.

"I worry about the space,'' said Yoshiko Mizura, the center's director. "I need a lot more space because there are too many children.'' The school has room for 60 children, but now there are 84.

Demand for day care grew during the last decade as the economy slumped, forcing more women to take jobs, Mizura said. They choose day care over kindergarten because day care centers are open longer.

Junko Hayashida, a 39-year-old nurse, has left her 5-year-old daughter in day care since she was younger than a year old. "I don't know if there are kindergartens that have these longer hours,'' she said.

The appeal of day care has kindergartens struggling to find children to fill their empty classrooms. "It's a competition now, not just between kindergartens but between kindergartens and day care centers,'' said Sister Raimonda Yamada of the Catholic-run Our Lady of Nagasaki Kindergarten.

Traditionally Japanese kindergartens were open only half a day, from midmorning to midafternoon. Now kindergartens are keeping children for more hours, one of several new services offered as schools vie for a smaller pool of students.

"The school didn't have a school bus before,'' said Junko Takeda, 41, as she stood in the shade of an apartment building on Nagasaki's outskirts while waiting for her daughter. "But since the competition became so fierce, they offered a school bus.''

As she waited, a yellow school bus from a kindergarten at a Catholic women's college pulled up and dropped off her daughter, the name of her stop pinned to the white blouse of her school uniform.

The Houju Kindergarten doesn't provide a bus. It's healthier for children to walk, said director Kazuhito Shimojo. But he worries the traditional approach turns off the parents of potential students, he said.

The competition for students also means that once highly selective kindergartens now take any children who apply. The Catholic-run Our Lady of Nagasaki Kindergarten once screened applicants on communication skills and physical development, Yamada said, as children in the after-school program played soccer in a gravel lot. While the school still conducts interviews, it now accepts everyone, she said.

"Thirty years ago, the kindergarten chose which families to take in,'' she said. "Now the families choose which kindergarten to go to.''

But while families can now be pickier about kindergartens, many are concerned about the downsides of shrinking family sizes. "It's easy to find a school, but if we have less children we feel sorry for them,'' said Shigetaka Yamashite, a 56-year-old father of two who was picking up his 3-year-old daughter from the Houju Kindergarten.

"I'm worried the decline in the number of children also means the decline of the nation.''

At Our Lady of Nagasaki Kindergarten, declining attendance has made it difficult to fund maintenance and pay teachers. The school once had as many as 240 students. Now it just has 90, and needs 30 more to maintain a decent income, Yamada said.

At the other end of Japan's age scale, the proportion of people older than 65 is expected to nearly double in the next 50 years. The government faces serious challenges in finding new ways to care for its aging population.

So while Sister Yamada says it's possible her kindergarten will close, she and the other nuns are ready to align their work to serve Japan's oldest citizens. "We will stay here in any case,'' she said, "because we also run a care center for the elderly.''