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TONO, Japan — Since losing its last obstetrician five years ago, this city of nearly 32,000 in rural northern Japan has been desperately seeking a replacement. So desperately, in fact, that it recently promised a horse to any obstetrician willing to come here.

There have been no takers yet. In the meantime, the city has adopted a high-tech measure that may portend the future of child delivery in Japan: pregnant women are examined remotely by obstetricians using real-time data transmitted to the doctors' cell phones. When the doctors judge that a patient is about to go into labor, the woman heads to the nearest city with a maternity ward — usually Kamaishi, a 40-minute drive east of here, reached by a winding, mountainous, two-lane road that can be treacherous in winter.

Japan, with a rapidly aging population and a declining birth rate, is grappling with a severe shortage of working obstetricians and places for them to work. With a dearth of babies, hundreds of hospitals and clinics in Japan have shuttered their maternity wards since the beginning of the decade, turning their attention to potentially more lucrative elderly care.

Since 2000, the number of obstetricians in Japan has declined by more than 5 percent to 11,282 in 2004, the most recent year for which figures are available, according to the government. But that figure masks the severity of the shortage, experts say. The number of doctors delivering babies was fewer than 8,000 in 2005, according to an estimate by the Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Roughly half of all obstetricians are 50 or older, and overworked. Many have given up delivering babies and are focusing only on gynecology. At the same time, the number of medical students choosing obstetrics as their specialty has plummeted since 2004. Turned off by long hours, low pay and a rising risk of malpractice lawsuits in obstetrics, young doctors are gravitating instead toward specialties like dermatology and ophthalmology.