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A baby touches sunflowers while visiting the flower garden with his parents
© AFP/File Toru Yamanaka

But Japanese wives would be willing to have more children if their husbands did more to help out, the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research found.

According to the study, nearly half of Japanese husbands do less than 10 percent of domestic chores and child rearing tasks.

Though most wives, with or without jobs, believed husbands should share the workload, only 41 percent were hopeful it would happen.

Some 82 percent of wives surveyed said they performed 80 percent of child rearing chores.

The study also found that in households where husbands did help out couples wanted more children.

But it also showed that more and more husbands are working longer hours.

Japan is currently struggling with a falling birth rate and aging population.

Unless people have more children, the government forecasts the population will be halved to 60 million by 2100 from 127.76 million in 2005, putting increasing strain on its social security system.

Japanese people are marrying later in life, while an increasing number of women are choosing not to wed or have children at all, in part due to the high cost of child rearing and schooling.

Some 7,771 married women took part in the survey.

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