For the past decade, Japan has been shrinking.Last year alone, its population fell by 400,000 as births failed to keep up with deaths.

Total fertility rates offer some good news: they have increased to 1.44 from a rock-bottom low of 1.26 in 2005. (To put the trend into perspective, it was 4.54 in 1947.) But the uptick still isn’t enough to buoy the country into growth after years of population loss. If the trends continue, the population is set to drop from 125 million to 88 million over the next fifty years. The predictions make the government’s goal to stabilize the figure at 100 million appear quixotic.

It comes as little surprise that even a conservative nationalist like Prime Minister Shinzo Abe would look into support programs for women. Yet his proposals represent a remarkable deviation from conventional right-wing approaches. These have ranged from the wartime maternalist slogan of “Give birth, increase [the population]!” [umeyō, fuyaseyō], to a celebration of the “professional homemaker” [sengyō shufu], who keeps the home fires burning and the children on track at school as the male breadwinner pursues the middle-class dream.