A JAPANESE city where no male municipal worker has ever taken a day of paternity leave is to force new fathers to take six weeks off and introduce themselves to the mysteries of babies.

Under Ota city’s unique new regime, which aims to smash traditional Japanese perceptions about parenting roles, all male city workers with babies will be required to stay at home for a total of 40 days during their child’s first year of life.

On their return to work, the men will have to tell their colleagues the lessons they have learnt from childcare.

Ota’s plan has been devised amid rising desperation in political circles about the younger generation’s failure to produce more children. Fertility rates stand at a 60-year low of 1.29 children per couple.

The enforced paternity leave hinges on the theory that by involving fathers more closely in the business of child-rearing, women might be less daunted by the idea of larger families.

The fathers will not be able to take more than one week of their leave consecutively, and on their return to work will have to submit a report about how they used their time and what they learned about their place in the home.

The plan to dispel the deeply entrenched view in Japan that child-rearing is solely women’s work comes after a Cabinet office white paper. The damning government report described Japan as a “developing country” when it comes to promoting gender equality, blaming particularly the fact that in many industries the workforce is still heavily male-dominated. City bureaucracies came in for particular criticism.

The survey on gender equality itself had not been seen as important enough to be carried out for more than 20 years: the last set of comparable statistics on Japanese gender roles dates from 1982.

Across Japan, short paternity leaves are part of a work culture that has historically made fathers who spend too long with their babies feel like wimps. During the childrearing period, a husband in Japan spends an average 48 minutes per day on household work, compared with around three hours in Europe and the US.

A spokesperson for the Ota city personnel division said that the scheme was designed to “get men involved in raising children”, and that tough measures were required to dislodge perceptions lurking at the heart of post-war Japanese society.

Ota’s paternity leave differs starkly from that of most of corporate Japan and the civil service in that the fathers will be paid their full salary.

Japanese law allows men and women to take a full year off work on the birth of a child, but those rare men who decide to do so receive only a fraction of their usual salaries. Labour Ministry figures show that only 0.4 per cent of men with children aged under one took any paternity leave last year.

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