Policies and political discourses depend on historical contexts and local languages. The vocabulary to define social problems represents and leads the focus of public opinion. This paper reports on the result of a literature survey on the Japanese word “syousika” (or “shoshika”), coined through discourses on demographic transition in Japan, which literally means a decreasing number of children. Today, this word occupies the central position in Japanese political discourses on low fertility and shrinking population. It is believed that this word made its first appearance in the early 1990s. However, it was already in literature in the early 1980s, although its meaning was different. In those days, the word simply meant a decrease in the number of siblings. It had nothing to do with the country's fertility or population. The word was used in a conservative perspective to express the worry that a smaller family could restrict socialization of youths, making them too individualistic. Such usage was by government officials in the Ministry of Education as well as by researchers in educational sociology. In the early 1990s, the country's record-hitting low fertility attracted public attention. Within a few years, the word “syousika” gained a new meaning to symbolize that phenomenon. Demography researchers borrowed the word and authorized its use as a technical term to indicate below-replacement fertility. Nonetheless, the word has varied connotations, not limited to low fertility, serving as a magic term to cover various problems related to population. This paper traces the transformation of the meaning of the word to explore how it has impacted political debates on population.

「独自研究」(original research) とは、Wikipedia 用語で「信頼できる媒体において未だ発表されたことがないもの」をいい、具体的には「未発表の事実、データ、概念、理論、主張、アイデア」などを指す [1]。Wikipediaは多数の匿名執筆者が編集することのできるオンライン事典であるため、記事の品質を維持するためにさまざまな規則を設けている。独自研究の利用禁止はそうした規則のひとつで、信頼できない情報源からの情報を排除することによって記事の信頼性を確保する役割を果たしている。 この基準に照らして日本政府の政策立案や評価のプロセスをみると、その多くが政府自身による独自研究に立脚していることがわかる。Wikipediaレベルの信頼性を確保する手段がとられていないので、政策を正当化するために持ち出されるデータの質が保証できない弊害が生まれている。たとえば今年1月の国会での首相施政方針演説のなかにあった、ひとり親家庭の大学進学率が上昇したという数値は、厚生労働省「全国ひとり親世帯等調査」に基づくものとされる [2]。だがこの「大学進学率」をどうやって計算したのかは、当時はよくわかっていなかった。その後の国会質疑 [3] で計算方法の概略はわかったものの、さまざまな疑問点が解消されずに残っている。 政府は、近年、「エビデンスに基づく政策立案」(evidence-based policy making: EBPM) をスローガンに政策の立案・評価過程の合理化を推進している。しかし上のような弊害に対して、EBPMが改善の役に立つかというと、そういう方向には進みそうにない。日本政府の唱えるEBPMは、むしろ独自研究を推進する内容であるからだ。たとえば2018年の総務省「EBPMに関する有識者との意見交換会」の報告 [4] は、ほぼ全編が独自のデータを分析する前提の内容である。「文献調査」は、「関係者からの聞き取り等」と同様のオプショナルな位置づけで、一言だけ言及されている。 一方、医療の分野では、この四半世紀の間に「エビデンスに基づく医療」(evidence-based medicine: EBM) が支配的な潮流となってきた [5]。EBMにおいては、意思決定の材料として使うエビデンスはまず医学文献の網羅的な検索によって得るものなので、独自研究は実質的に排除されている。EBMは「エビデンスに基づく」という冠をEBPMと共有してはいるものの、この点では正反対の方向を向いており、独自研究の弊害を免れている。ただ、EBMに関する議論では、なぜ独自研究を排除するかは示されてこなかった。EBMにとって、医師や病院が文献を渉猟せずに自らの経験だけにしたがって治療方針を決めることは克服すべき悪しき伝統であり、それは議論するまでもない前提だった。 本報告では、意思決定過程から独自研究を排除する意義について、(1) 捏造・改竄の抑止、 (2) 専門家からの批判を通じた信頼性の向上、 (3) 非専門家による反論機会の保障、の3側面から検討する。また、独自研究に基づく政策立案の弊害を防ぐため、独自研究排除原則またはそれと同等の機能を持つ制度を確立する方向性について論じる。

Studies that compare social conditions in a certain country with those of other nations can result in national feelings of inferiority or superiority. Comparative studies thus often serve as political devices. Owing to the development of the Internet and translation technology, large-scale, cross-national surveys have become a low-cost means to manipulate public opinion. In this paper, I introduce the case of the political use of the International Fertility Decision-Making Study (IFDMS) in Japan. IFDMS was conducted in 2009-2010 by researchers from Cardiff University and Merck Serono, a global pharmaceutical company. IFDMS prepared a questionnaire in 13 languages for 18 countries, targeted at both men and women who were trying to conceive. It featured questions regarding medical knowledge about pregnancy. According to the published results, the respondents who lived in Japan exhibited a lower level of knowledge about conception than those in other countries. Based on this result, medical authorities in Japan insisted that, because of the lack of knowledge, the Japanese people had thoughtlessly postponed childbirth, resulting in fertility decline. The government accordingly created a new outline of population policy in 2015, in which it referred the results from IFDMS to advocate sex education for youth in order to encourage early marriage. However, IFDMS is unreliable. It has many defects including mistranslations in the questionnaire. Nevertheless, results from IFDMS were accepted as reliable scientific findings in conferences and journals in the field of natural sciences in Europe, bypassing scrutiny by social science researchers in the targeted countries. Language differences also prevented the accurate understanding of the research results. The case of the political effect of IFDMS thus teaches us that social impacts of comparative studies may be deceptive and nullify social scientific efforts to accurately perceive the society in which we live.

The belief that women rapidly lose their fertility as they age has been popularized using biological findings about “aging” of eggs (or oocytes) in the ovaries. Recently, Japan has experienced national propaganda based on such a belief. In the past decade, doctors and medical organizations have broadcasted information about age-related fertility decline for women in their 20s and 30s. Their theory has spread on mass media without any scrutiny, creating a social pressure on women to bear children as early as possible. Such information has also served as evidence for the government's pronatalist policy of getting young people married. This paper traces the history of the belief and explores how it emerged, progressed, and spread as authorized “scientific” knowledge by focusing on the graphs frequently used to support the “egg aging” discourse. A literature survey revealed the following facts that exemplify the role of traditional experts and journalists in creating the “post-fact” phenomena. The graphs, seemingly quoted from the scientific literature, were actually fabricated, falsified, trimmed, or misinterpreted. Doctors manipulated graphs, supported it with unreachable citations, and provided insufficient or distorted explanations about the data and methods. These techniques are being used in the field of obstetrics and gynecology since the 1980s. Journalists have recently contributed to the propaganda, using sensational language to polish the message. During the development and radicalization of the discourse, no social mechanism was performing the fact-checking function. The “egg aging” propaganda, endorsed by medical authorities, aroused people's feeling about the alarming prospect of the country's low birthrate and shrinking population. It eventually achieved hegemony in public debates in 2010s Japan.

Family laws and familial ideologies are crucial factors for gender equality that are often overlooked in gender-equality discourses. This lecture explores how marriage and childbirth are disadvantageous for women in Japan, and the institutionalization of this disadvantage in family laws and in hegemonic family ideology. The focus is on the adverse economic consequences that women experience for career interruptions and child rearing responsibilities, which become more visible after divorce. Results from the National Family Research of Japan (NFRJ) surveys from 1999 to 2009 highlight a great gender gap in post-divorce economic living standards. This is attributable to women’s interrupted careers and their responsibility to take care of children. Analyses of public discourses reveal that the disadvantages encountered by wives and mothers are deeply rooted in the history of law. The disadvantages have also been justified in ideological debates on social problems regarding family, work, welfare, and population issues. Although laws and policies have made some progress in reducing risks, the advancement has been so slow and limited that the underlying mechanism of gender inequality remains untouched.

The family system is one of the subsystems of the Japanese society in which gender equality has hardly been achieved. This paper discusses the current state of gender equality focusing on women's economic disadvantage in post-divorce life and on public discourses that legitimates the gender-unequal family system.

産婦人科・生殖医学では、科学的根拠のないグラフが広報と政治活動に使われている。これらの問題点を解説するとともに、政府の「少子化対策」との関連を検討する

This paper put forward a proposal for elaborating ideology analysis. In parallel with development of empirical analysis to specify causality in the real social phenomena, we should develop methods for analysis of ideology to explore dynamics of what we perceive and think about the real society. Using them in combination, we obtain a powerful tool to foresee the future. This paper proposes a framework of ideology-institution dynamics with causal modeling (IIDCM). IIDCM defines ideology as a system of interdependent beliefs classified into three categories: beliefs about facts (how the society is), about ideals (how the society should be), and about norms (what we should do). A feedback cycle is assumed as follows. We have beliefs about facts based on our observations of society. We have also beliefs about ideals as criteria to evaluate whether the social condition is good or bad. Such criteria and beliefs about facts jointly justify a norm to realize a better society. If the norm is institutionalized, it determines people’s action and brings social outcomes. And if we observe the social outcomes through empirical analysis, it will make changes in our beliefs about facts. IIDCM theorizes relationships among ideology, institution, and people’s action. We can write a scenario and select the cast to predict social changes, using IIDCM as a basic framework. This paper takes an example of fertility issue in Japan. Political responses to low fertility in Japan since late-1980s have been too conservative to set ideological changes about gender and family. However, facing the population shrinking, the government (and people) are now seriously recognizing the necessity of drastic social changes. We can write probable scenarios, with the framework of IIDCM, according to what policy will be selected and how public opinion will change hegemonic ideology related to gender and family.

2015年8月、文部科学省作成の高校保健副教材『健康な生活を送るために』に「女性の妊娠のしやすさの年齢による変化」の改竄グラフ (図1) が掲載された。このほかにも、産婦人科・生殖医学業界では怪しげなグラフが種々使われている。本報告では、これらのグラフの問題点を解説するとともに、間違った知識を流布させようとする専門家にどのようにして対抗すべきかを考察する。