RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Japan has made some progress recently in getting more women to join the workforce. The latest numbers show more Japanese women work outside the home than American women. But for a rapidly aging and shrinking population, progress may not be happening fast enough. NPR's Elise Hu reports on one of the biggest reasons Japanese women chose to stay home.
ELISE HU, BYLINE: It's past dinnertime at a Japanese child care center in Tokyo's Setagaya ward. But because of their parents' 12-hour workdays, children still fill every classroom and play space here until as late as 8 at night. Through a translator, they invited me to play.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILDREN: (Through interpreter) If you want to play, there is toys there for you.
HU: Oh, thank you.
The children here at Hato-Poppo nursery school range from 3-month-old infants to kindergartners. It's one of Japan's highly-coveted subsidized day care centers for families of all income levels. Takayuki Yoshizawa is director.
TAKAYUKI YOSHIZAWA: (Through interpreter) There's a huge demand for day care and kindergartens. The number of day cares are increasing, but slowly.
HU: Parents face long odds just to get their child into a center like this. As of this spring, about 23,000 children in Tokyo were on day care waiting lists. Reika Hattori considers herself lucky that she found her preschooler a spot in the center.
REIKA HATTORI: In total, I applied for maybe 20 to 30.
HU: It meant a gauntlet of applications and lists, competition for slots so tough that it has its own name, hokatsu. She says her fellow moms often wanted to keep working after having babies.
HATTORI: Some of them couldn't get back because of the nursery school - because they can't find any nursery school.
HU: In fast-aging Japan, resolving the child care crisis is now at the center of economic policy. Recognizing that keeping young, educated women in the workforce is crucial to Japan's economy, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made, quote, "womenomics" central to his economic revival plan. His pledge is to cut child care waiting lists to zero.
KATHY MATSUI: They're about halfway to their goal, but at least there's been some progress on that front.
HU: Kathy Matsui is chief Japan strategist at Goldman Sachs. She coined the term womenomics more than a decade ago and has long advocated for gender diversity in Japan.
MATSUI: If you could raise Japan's female labor participation rate to match that of Japanese men, you could significantly lift the size of Japan's economy.
HU: On the policy front, there's movement in getting more women in the workforce. But Matsui says they're still at a disadvantage because cultural attitudes are harder to change.
MATSUI: Even if you have the infrastructure and the support around you, there are questions from your family members about, is it really appropriate to be raising a newborn child, your baby, when you're not home full-time.
HU: Japanese men do the lowest amount of household work in the developed world, a reflection that the East Asian nation still sees caretaking and household duties as the women's domain. For mom Reika Hattori, finding a day care slot was one win. But she says her husband sharing the load at home...
HATTORI: Very important.
HU: Is how she's made things work. Elise Hu, NPR News, Tokyo.