A Pink Pagoda? Japan Adores Baby Girls

ISEHARA, Japan - Baby boys are not wanted here - not statistically speaking, at least.

In a stunning repudiation of traditional Asian values that, for centuries, have put a premium on producing male heirs, surveys indicate that up to 75 percent of young Japanese parents now prefer baby girls.

Daughters are seen as cuter, easier to handle, more emotionally accessible and, ever more important in this fast-aging society, more likely to look after their elderly parents.

Plenty of Japanese doubt whether the current crop of female infants will grow up to fulfill such parental hopes. Nevertheless, a passion for baby girls has spawned hot-selling books and magazines, pricey new personalized advice services for sex selection, and clinics dispensing suppository jelly - pink to help produce girls or green for boys - for would-be parents trying to conceive the child of their dreams.

"Boys don't listen and are harder to raise," said Yumi Yamaguchi, 27. To improve her odds of conceiving a girl, Yamaguchi scrupulously followed the advice in a popular sex-selection book and took her temperature for an entire year before trying to become pregnant. She sobbed with joy when daughter Ami was born 14 months ago.

"Boys and their mothers seem to have a weak bond, but mothers and daughters stay close all of their lives," she said.

Yamaguchi lives in a tiny, two-room apartment in Isehara, 30 miles southwest of Tokyo. Her husband and his family run a lumber company. Twenty years ago, such couples usually hoped for a boy to carry on the family business and were likely to keep trying until they got one.

But Yamaguchi says she and her husband can't afford a second child, and even if their economic prospects improve, they will try for another girl.

Small number selecting sex

Dr. Shiro Sugiyama, chairman of the Sex Selection Study Association of Japan, which has 800 obstetricians as members, estimates that only 2 percent of Japanese women seeking to conceive are taking measures to select the baby's gender. Only their thermometers know for sure how many women are really trying, because many, such as Yamaguchi, do not consult doctors on the subject.

So far, there has been no measurable change in the sex ratio of Japanese newborns.

That may be explained in part by the fact that sex-selective abortion is unheard of in Japan, doctors and sociologists say. Although abortion is legal until the 22nd week of pregnancy, the Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology forbids its doctors to reveal the gender of a baby before then, because of concerns about gender-targeted abortions.

Gender balance a concern

The question that concerns demographers is whether and how fast the boy-to-girl birthrate could change as Japan's anemic birthrates fall further and the technology for selecting a baby's gender - although far from foolproof - grows more reliable, cheaper and, to many people, less morally troubling than abortion.

Sugiyama, whose how-to books on sex selection have sold more than 465,000 copies in the past six years, claims that his method is about 80 percent effective. It is based on such low-tech techniques as charting the ovulation cycle using body temperature, as well as the use of a pH-altering jelly that favors survival of the sperm of choice.

Although Japan's inheritance laws no longer favor sons over daughters, and failure to produce a male heir is no longer grounds for divorce, pressure to bear sons - especially in rural areas - has not vanished altogether, said another doctor at the clinic, Satoshi Ienaga.

Still, the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research in Tokyo systematically has documented the growing preference for girls by asking the same questions of married couples every five years. In 1982, the survey indicated that of those families who wanted only one child, 51.5 percent wanted a boy. But by 1987, only 37.1 percent wanted a boy, and by 1997 it was just 25 percent.

The vast majority of couples said they wanted two children, a boy and a girl, virtually unchanged since 1982. But the number of families who wanted no boys and two girls had jumped to 13 percent from 8.9 percent in 1982. Only 2.1 percent of couples said they wanted two boys.

More men want a boy

A majority of Japanese men still prefer to have a boy if they have only one child, but most men want one child of each sex. This leads some observers to conclude that the women's yen for girls might not translate into more female births, as many men might not cooperate - in the bedroom or the doctor's office - with the sex-selection regimen chosen by their wives.

Whether or not the girl craze produces more females, experts say it is noteworthy as an indicator of profound social change that includes a national pension system that makes male offspring less essential in financially supporting their elderly parents, a weakening of the ancestral male-dominated family system, increasing individualism and the much-improved socioeconomic status of women.

But some people say more parents want girls because life is no longer sweet for Japanese boys. To hear them tell it, hapless male tots are condemned to endure the take-no-prisoners Japanese educational system, followed by a life sentence as a faceless drone for Japan Inc.

And although Japanese society might give more choices to its daughters, expectations for sons have not been liberated.

"Mothers feel pressure to raise these boys as they always did: `Become a good man,' " said Yukiko Nakayama, deputy editor of My Baby magazine. "Of course, these pressures existed in the past, but then men had special privileges. Now the privileges are gone, but they still have all the responsibilities."

However tarnished their cachet or prospects, Japanese baby boys are not likely to be outnumbered by girls in the near future, if ever, said Dr. Kenji Hayashi of Japan's National Institute for Public Health.

Meanwhile, Japan is only beginning to grapple with the ethical issues raised by the emerging sex-selection technology. So far, the reaction of the medical establishment is "go slow."

In 1994, the powerful obstetrics society, citing safety concerns, issued an edict against using the most potent new sex-selection technique, which involves separating sperm containing the heavier X chromosomes, which produce girls, from that bearing the lighter Y chromosomes, which produce boys. Artificial insemination or in-vitro fertilization can follow.

The head of the obstetrics society's ethics committee, Dr. Seichiro Fujimoto, said the organization's decision that sperm separation should not be used for sex selection is based on both safety concerns and ethical objections.

"The general feeling is that it goes against God's logic," Fujimoto said from Hokkaido University Hospital. "The silent majority, most Japanese, would be against it."

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In China, there are 118 boys per 100 girls under age 5.

In South Korea, despite the introduction of harsh penalties for doctors caught performing prenatal gender screenings, by 1990 there were 117 male births per 100 female, and a recent study estimated that about 30,000 female fetuses were aborted that year. Statistics suggest that half of all female fetuses conceived in families that had two children were aborted.

In Taiwan, the ratio of boys to girls in 1990 was 110 to 100.

In Japan, however, 105.4 boys were born last year for every 100 girls, a ratio statistically unchanged since 1899 and matching the global norm.