Firehorse superstition helps uncover why women's education may not drive Japan's fertility decline

April 27, 2026 Firehorse superstition helps uncover why women's education may not drive Japan's fertility decline by Waseda University edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Robert Egan Sadie Harley scientific editor Meet our editorial team Behind our editorial process Robert Egan associate editor Meet our editorial team Behind our editorial process Editors' notes This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: fact-checked peer-reviewed publication trusted source proofread The GIST Add as preferred source Researchers find novel causal evidence on the effect of Japanese women's education level on family formation during periods of traditional gender norms. Using a unique quasi-experimental design in Japan, they find that increased educational opportunities lead to modest delays in marriage and motherhood without increasing the likelihood of lifelong singlehood. Credit: Associate Professor Rong Fu, Waseda University, Japan The rapidly declining marriage and fertility rates across developed East Asian societies strain pension and health care systems, threaten economic growth, and reshape entire societies. To tackle this issue, governments in Japan and across East Asia have invested heavily in pronatalist measures, but often with limited success. For instance, Japan's government has repeatedly expanded childcare subsidies and parental leave provisions, yet the total fertility rate hit a record low of 1.20 in 2024. A common narrative in media commentary, policy circles, and even within families is that women are "too educated" or "too career-focused" to marry and have children. However, the exact causal relationship between women's education level and family formation is not well understood. To fill this knowledge gap, a team of researchers from Japan and Singapore, led by Associate Professor Rong Fu from the Faculty of Commerce, Waseda University, Japan, used a novel quasi-experimental approach to understand the relationship between education, fertility, and marriage in Japan. Their findings were published online in the journal Demography. For this study, the researchers leveraged the Japanese zodiac concept of the "Year of the Firehorse." Women who are born during this particular zodiac year are believed to be particularly inauspicious about marriage, with the superstition suggesting that these women possess fierce temperaments that could lead to marital discord. Explaining the motivation behind their study, Dr. Fu says, "As the Year of the Firehorse returns in 2026 for the first time in 60 years, our study uses the previous Firehorse year of 1966, which caused a dramatic baby bust driven by zodiac superstition, as a natural experiment to answer a question at the heart of East Asia's demographic crisis: Is women's education really to blame for declining marriage and fertility?" In the Firehorse year of 1966, many prospective parents sought to avoid having children born under this supposedly inauspicious zodiac sign. This avoidance behavior resulted in a smaller cohort of women, born between January and March 1967, who faced reduced competition for educational resources in later years. Since the academic year in Japan begins in April, these individuals born in early 1967 were grouped with the previous year's cohort for educational purposes. This mismatch was leveraged to identify a group of women born between…

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