They make it easier for parents to raise children.

In the Shizuoka Prefecture town of Nagaizumi at the foot of Mount Fuji, there is a child-care support center named Mikan-chan, where mothers bring their preschool children to play on weekday mornings and afternoons.

The town has three child-care support centers catering to mothers with toddlers who do not go to nursery school or kindergarten. The centers give the mothers a chance to share their child-raising experiences and information and let the children make friends with other youngsters.

Nonworking women who have child-related problems tend to be isolated from people they can seek advice from. Various surveys show such women find child-rearing more stressful than their working counterparts. Mikan-chan aims to provide communal support and encouragement to those women.

Only an hour to Tokyo by Shinkansen bullet train, the town and its environs are home to many factories and research institutes. There are stable jobs for the younger generation.

To accommodate the needs of the increasing number of young working couples, the town now has five municipal and private nursery schools taking care of children of working parents. For children of nonworking mothers, there are the three child-care support centers in addition to six kindergartens.

The national birthrate--the average number of children a woman will bear in her life--dropped to 1.29 last year. The number has been shrinking steadily since the mid-1970s, when it fell below the ``two kids per family'' level that is necessary to prevent a decline in the nation's population.

Despite this trend, however, the birthrate has risen over the last 10 years in some cities, towns and villages, about 70 of which have populations exceeding 10,000 people. In the town of Nagaizumi, which has a population of nearly 40,000, the birthrate rose by 0.1 to 1.72.

The Hyogo town of Goshiki on the west coast of Awaji Island in the Seto Inland Sea is mainly a farming and fishing community with a population of about 10,000. Here, too, the birthrate rose by 0.1 to 1.82.

``We have always made sure the locals would be able to keep working here,'' said Goshiki Mayor Akio Kuruma. The town succeeded in getting a medium-sized Kansai corporation to move in. And to secure jobs for local women, the town created its own health and welfare facility.

Thanks to the town's five nursery schools, women can go back to work as soon as they have children. And there is also Kazaguruma, a child-care support center of the same type as Nagaizumi's Mikan-chan.

Both towns have the following in common: There are jobs for younger people and nursery facilities for working parents, not to mention support for nonworking mothers. In short, everything is being done to make child-rearing easier for all parents.

The fact that the birthrate has risen in both towns is an indication that the birthrate does not have to keep dropping if the community knows how to deal with the problem.

The decision to have children is obviously up to each individual or couple. However, any society that deters one from having a baby cannot be considered a good place for anyone to live.

What problems are really causing the nation's declining birthrate? What should be done to make this society a better place where efforts are made to ease the worries of people thinking about having children? The towns of Nagaizumi and Goshiki have set good examples to follow.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Nov. 24(IHT/Asahi: November 25,2004)