Fertility norms in Japan

This page gives information of type fertility norms about the country Japan.
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Ideal family size

Measures of ideal family size have been computed in various rounds of the National Survey on Family Planning and the 2004 round of the National Survey on Population, Families, and Generations, conducted by the Mainichi Newspapers of Japan. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to locate a tabular form of the data. However, a graphical representation found in the Japan baby bust paper (Figure 1), as well as the accompanying text, suggest that ideal family size has remained stable at around 2.5 in the time period 1981-2004, and has always stayed bounded between 2.3 and 2.7. In particular, changes in fertility over the time period cannot be explained by changes in ideal family size.

Data on the 1981 survey (the first one) is below:

Age of women	Duration of current marriage	Ideal number of children	Desired number of children	Number of cases
Total (all ages)	12.98	2.771	2.534	3022
20-24	1.82	2.549	2.43	86
25-29	4.1	2.702	2.488	482
30-34	8.15	2.76	2.511	693
35-39	13.02	2.797	2.555	586
40-44	17.89	2.804	2.57	610
45-49	22.73	2.812	2.558	565