Weekly review (2024-02-18)

A long and productive week. The main task for me during the week was the preparation for the long-term strategy. At least I think I could clarify what we really have to think about and what we have to achieve under certain boundary conditions.

I might be just boasting, but I am good at thinking about one subject for a long period until I arrive at a robust idea. Since I started thinking about the strategy, it has already been several months, and I still haven’t gotten bored by doing the same thing again and again. My thought quality usually improves as I think longer and deeper, and the quality improvement doesn’t plateau even after several months. I recently realized that it is a rare quality, and perhaps my talent.

I was wondering why, and the only plausible explanation other than it’s an innate thing is that in Go, it is not rare for a player to think for one hour about just one move (when it comes to professional players, it could be even a few hours or more). When I was at my best, sometimes I needed to do so because sometimes one move (an irreversible decision) determines who is going to win.

On the flip side, my thought quality is average when I need to make a decision quickly. My colleagues are superior to me in that aspect, so I think it’s best if I can delegate most of the tasks to my colleagues, while I focus on something that really matters and requires in-depth deliberation.

Another thing that I realized about myself recently is that I don’t get bored observing human beings. For example, when I visit the field, I keep asking the same questions to the people, digging deeper and deeper. Usually, the translator gets bored after a few interviews, but I can do the same thing 10 times in 10 days. I am always amazed by the uniqueness of each individual. That might be another strength of mine, and I am thinking of starting some practice around this.

I had a chance to make a speech at an event to watch a film describing the plight of single mothers in Japan. The film was made by an Australian director, and because of that, it turned out to be a very objective documentary.

Especially in a country like Japan, a homogeneous country, it is difficult for a Japanese to make an objective documentary film. When you describe a problem, you cannot completely detach yourself from the problem because as a person who is in that society, he or she is also partially responsible for it. Also, if the society is homogeneous, another person’s predicament is felt so closely, and it is not easy to objectively describe the situation. I know many documentary films describing Japan’s poverty (including abuse), but most of them manipulate reality - be they optimistic or pessimistic. As an outsider who was willing to spend an enormous amount of time on the research, the director managed to strike a good balance.

In my speech, I explained the overview of Japan’s single-mother families. There are roughly 12 million households with kids (non-adults). Among them, 1.4 million are single-parent families, and 1.2 million are single-mother ones. The poverty ratio of single-parent families in Japan is above 50%, and it’s the highest among OECD nations, and among single-mother families, the ratio is above 60%.

The fundamental problem explaining the high poverty ratio of single-mother families is gender disparity. Because there is a pay gap, when a couple gets married and has a kid, the less-paid is more likely to leave the labor market, becoming a part-time worker or a housewife. In many cases, the less-paid is a woman, and it is a ‘rational’ household decision to maximize the utility of it. When they get divorced, the court of domestic relations (“Katei Saibansho”) is likely to give parental rights to the mother because she used to spend more time with the kid(s) and there is an attachment relationship between the mother and them. The Japanese labor market is not tolerant of people who temporarily left the market, and thus single mothers have it extremely difficult to find adequate jobs.

On top of that, the government is not spending enough money to address the challenge. The Japanese government is known for its stinginess in investment in kids and families – the spending per GDP is one of the worst among OECD nations. The reason is the age composition of the voters.

So in my opinion, we have to do two things. One is to reduce the gender pay gap by introducing many mechanisms such as mandatory parental leave for both parents. Another is to change government spending. I believe my work at the Japan Office for Standards on Children’s Services will address the latter.