TOKYO — In one of the most heated political contests in recent memory, Japan’s opposition party is courting voters with an enticing promise: monthly cash for kids.
By giving families 26,000 yen, or $275, a month per child through junior high, the Democratic Party of Japan hopes to ease parenting costs and encourage more women to give birth in a country where the rapidly aging population is among the gravest long-term threats.
Parents already are given a lump sum of 350,000 yen, or $3,700, for the birth of each child.
The program is the centerpiece of a plan to steer the world’s second-biggest economy to the left, away from what opposition leader Yukio Hatoyama describes as the “fundamentalist pursuit of capitalism” that he says led to last year’s financial crisis.
If the Democrats dethrone the ruling Liberal Democratic Party as is widely expected in parliamentary elections Sunday, they vow to put people — not Japan Inc. — at the core of their economic policy.
That would represent a significant change for Japan, which for decades has prioritized industrial interests in the drive to propel the country from its defeat in World War II to its current position as a world economic power.
