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East Asia Resource Center, Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington

Ultra-Low Birth Rate in East Asia: Care, Crisis Discourses, and Collaborative Responses – NCTA Online Program

In this one-day program, we examined Japan’s declining birth rates through the lens of “care” (kea, ケア) and the evolving discourse of “who cares” that gained renewed attention in the aftermath of the 3.11 disaster and the COVID-19 pandemic. With guidance from Professor Andrea Gevurtz Arai, we explored how these conversations have centered on reproductive labor in the home, described by some as the “nerve center of the production of labor power,” and how moments of crisis, including irradiation and infection, have intensified the pressure on gendered expectations of continuous caregiving.

Participants learned how feminist demographers and scholars have analyzed the division and devaluation of this reproductive labor, particularly in the context of economic recession and neoliberal reforms since 1999. These conditions have not only made caregiving unsustainable for many, but have also become the object of active refusal.

Together, we also considered two key consequences of these intersecting conditions and debates. First, we explored how crisis discourse around low birth rates, often omitting the topic of reproduction itself, has spurred feminist collaborations across East Asia. Second, we focused on emerging scholarly and activist efforts to link care with broader questions of democracy, anti-war movements, and environmental justice.

This program invited participants to engage with the ideas of eco-feminists such as Nancy Fraser and eco-socialists such as Kohei Saito, whose work highlights the connection between gendered and ecological forms of extraction, both indispensable and systematically disavowed. As we discussed, there are no contemporary politics without considering both gender and the environment.

Date and Time

Wednesday, November 19, 2025, 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM (Pacific Time).
This program was held on Zoom.

Program Benefits

  • Online resources.
  • Free WA OSPI clock hours.

Program leader

Andrea Gevurtz Arai is a cultural anthropologist of Japan and East Asia and Acting Assistant Professor in The Henry M Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. Arai was the interim chair of Korean Studies 2023-24. She is the author of The Strange Child: Education and the Psychology of Patriotism in Recessionary Japan (2016) and co-editor of Spaces of Possibility: Korea and Japan and Global Futures in East Asia. Her chapter, “Nuclear Visuality and Popular Resistance in Hitomi Kamanaka’s Documentary Films” was published in Rachel DiNitto (editor) Eco-Disaster Films in Japan (2024). Arai organized a conference “Ultra Low-Birthrate Societies in East Asia: Crisis Discourses and Responses (UW, April,. 2025) and is completing a second book: The 3.11 Generation: Changing the Subjects of Gender, Labor and Environment in Trans-Local Japan.

 

This program was sponsored by the East Asia Resource Center at the University of Washington and funded by a Freeman Foundation grant in support of the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA).