Japan ‘on verge of no longer functioning’ after birth rate plummets to record new low
Japan ‘on verge of no longer functioning’ after birth rate plummets to record new low
Japan saw record 1.6 million deaths last year as births marked a 5% fall
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The biggest issue that no one ever wants to talk about is ....
... it's isn't about the QUANTITY of life
.... it's about the QUALITY of life.
If people are able to have a comfortable, stable and prosperous life, with plenty of their own free time to enjoy without worrying about losing everything then they'll make time and an effort to have a family and children.
If all our wealthy overlords ever want to do is squeeze every penny out of us all the time, then people will be less likely to want to have children.
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It also strongly correlates to women's rights and access to education. The more educated women are, the less likely they are to have a lot of kids.
https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/health/female-education-and-childbearing-closer-look-data
It's why you see a renewed attack on women in some developed countries, especially in the US.
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Here's what happened in America.
In the 1960s the "Women's Lib" movement started. They got a lot of press coverage because it was a good stroy, but didn't actually change things a lot.
In 1973 the Oil Embargo hit and suddenly one job wasn't enough for the family to survive. Lots of wives had to go out and look for work to keep paying the bills.
The Right has been lying that women getting jobs is what destroyed the one income family.
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It's either developed countries or the US, you can't have both
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... which is a serious threat to said overlords, ironically.
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"It's so expensive to have children in Japan that birthrate is further declining."
I swear to God these people couldn't connect the dots with a GPS.
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Surely if they just instill good Christian moral values like forced birth, racism, and tribal isolationism all their problems will be solved.
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I'm not sure why all the sarcasm. I mean, America's problems have all been solved.
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I'm not sure how true this statement is. I go to Japan every year and the child care infrastructure there is incredible.
The healthcare is icredible - you can literally summon healthcare assistant if youe kid is sick at any point for free to your home
Then there's incredible public transporatiob system, parks, everything is equipped with child support and even culture heavily respects kids so they can do most things independently.
I think they mean expensive time and desire wise and Japanese still work incredible hours many of which seem to actually negatively impact productivity. People don't feel like such investment is worth it and tbh that could easily shift around with cultural changes but Japan is very allergic to those.
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This is an interesting point. So apparently the problems of having that terrible working culture are solved for (ish) to promote procreation, but it's not helping. Gee, I wonder if possibly creating a society of miserable people and making it easier for them to create more people they presume will be miserable doesn't work because they just don't want to do that.
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you know...I've been saying this in passing for the last decade and I'm starting to believe it.
the rich continue to rape the planet, spurning global warming on at an alarming rate. it's almost like they don't care about it--or rather they want it to happen.
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
They don't care about it getting worse. because global warming is their answer to every goal they have.
Climate change will:
- destabilize world governments
- drastically reduce world population
- displace millions, forcing them to migrate to safe zones
- allow them to capitalize on an opportunity to become "gods"
once half if not more of the planets population has died, the planet might start to regulate itself, though it will never be the same again.
I believe they are trying to take over the world and enslave humanity for their own benefit. climate change is just one of the many attacks they are throwing at the world right now.
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The problem with conspiracy theories is that they're trying to assign a single point of blame to a complete systemic failure. The feeling is that if we can simply find out who is doing this and boil it down to one person or one group we can then simply attack that group and solve all our problems. That's exactly the ox that fascism has yolked on its ride to power in every single generation.
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countries have mostly abandoned climate action change,
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Elysium but in New Zealand
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We're already slaves. They are just making it more obvious.
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pretty much the same in korea, i think korea is slightly worst off, china is beginning to see its effects too, they already trying to change that by "encouraging more sex", but they arnt solving the underlying issue, which is the one-child policy that devastated the female to male ratio and HCOL. and they also have harsh work ethic.
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slightly worst off
worse* off
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My first two kids were born in Japan, and they were actually pretty cheap. The local city gives you some money (a few thousand) when your child is born, and day care was good and super cheap, like $10 per day because it was subsidized.
It really wasn't very expensive.
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Well it does get a lot more expensive when almost everybody wants to live in the same tiny square of the country Tokyo's population will decline in 2035 according to some estimates
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You can tell capitalism is super efficient and sustainable by how it totally collapses without fresh babies to sacrifice.
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Which is why, in the U.S., the rich are turning back abortion rights and access to birth control, and gutting our public education. They could, instead, work to build a country where people felt safe, and supported--healthcare, jobs with decent wages, education, etc.--but the filthy rich are psychopaths who care only about themselves, and will do nothing that costs them money, power, and control. Instead, they'll GLADLY watch the people (people they depend, incidentally, for what good is power and control, if there's no one to wield it over?) suffer at great levels in attempts to achieve their goals.
It takes a lot of poor people to make one filthy rich person.
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Babies are expensive and time consuming to develop into useful serfs. The US is not yet hitting most of the consequences from low birth rates because it’s balanced out by immigration. As long as they keep encouraging and welcoming immigration ….
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Well-said. They don't see people as people, they see them as farm stock plotted on spreadsheets that they can manipulate by pulling levers.
And happiness just isn't a variable they would ever think of pulling a lever to increase. In fact I suspect they see a lack of it as an effective motivator, as long as it's managed properly through division and distraction, and those desperately upset little data points don't start assembling guillotines.
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I don't think any social/political structure would survive without a birth rate
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Any system would collapse without newer generations.
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Except only one of those systems depends on the exploitation of the working class, ya know, your breeding live stock. Only one of those system destroys a work life balance. Only one leaves the population with little free time and shrinking resources with which to have and raise a kid. Japan is past, and the US is passing, the tipping point. Society may deem it necessary but the potential parents recognize it as untenable.
What happens when the orphan crushing machine has no orphans? -
True, but no other system disincentives children like capitalism.
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I mean, any system collapses if you don't have the people to actively participate in it.
I'm not saying that as a defense of capitalism, more so as pointing out how dumb your comment is.
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Thing is, we don't really know what's the reason for the current worldwide trend in much, much lower natality rate. We've observed in rich countries and poor countries, religious and atheist countries, capitalist and communist countries (both USSR and PRC, who have had very different economic systems), in countries with no safety nets but also in countries with large social programs, in western countries, but also in eastern countries.
The only thing I can think of these days is education level. Is it possible that education is inversely correlated with natality rates? Or maybe women in the workforce. I'm not arguing for either point, I'm just thinking about what the cause of a world-wide issue might be, because it's happening everywhere and seemingly without any clear common cause.
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There's plenty of research out there that shows educating women leads to reduced rates of teenage pregnancy and total number of children. Like its pretty damn solid evidence that educating women helps them make informed family planning decisions.
I think a bigger problem is increasing infertility rates and how many people need to use IVF to conceive in the first place. Something worldwide is disrupting our hormones and affecting our ability to reproduce. Even if someone had everything they needed and wanted to support a child, they might not physically be able to create one or carry a pregnancy to term.
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Well, if you prioritize shareholder growth, before Support of children and make sure people have to work super hard to be able to sustain themselves and can't afford to have a family.... Then you should not be supervised that you don't have any babies in the country
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The national pyramid scheme
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Its not capitalism that causes the over leveraged ponzi scheme, its the lender of last resort they call the Bank of Japan.
In a capitalist lending system you wouldn't get bailed out for making risky loans, so there wouldn't be the moral hazard, or the heightened cantillon effect to profit off debt accumulation.
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Progressives have made kids useless. In the distant past they could help carry firewood or gay bales around the homestead.
Industrial revolution fucked it up. Sure for a while you could send them down into the mines or get them sweeping chimneys but over time that got outlawed due to the increased danger these jobs involved.
Now, why bother having kids? You can't do anything with them. Even worse, they play games like Minecraft. You are literally spending your money for them to virtually work in the mines where they don't bring in any money at all!
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But I bet they will continue to work people to the bone as a point of pride...like I wonder what could be contributing to this problem.
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This right here. It's not that people don't want kids. It's that they're at their breaking point already.
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Even if you provide good living conditions and incentives to people they will choose to not have enough kids to sustain the population if they're given the choice. Statistics from the past 100 years clearly show it in all rich and even poor countries.
We reached 8 billions humans because people, especially women, didn't have any other choice.
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Oh, you mean like Karoshi? The term that translates to "overwork death"? Good times. Good times.
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Yeah, and in a city with no greenery for kids to play in and afraid to let the kids out of their sight for 1 minute.
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There's a surprising amount of green for major cities that otherwise look like concrete jungles. There's usually plenty of parks and kids are in general very safe. Maybe this is just my comparison from originally living in the states, but it is super safe for children and the amount of expected unsupervised travel kids do in Japan is astonishing.
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Dude, Japan is so safe the cops are largely overglorified tourist and traffic guides. The kids run around alone all the time.
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That’s an American point of view
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They've got women's rights but they hate immigration, this outcome is inevitable regardless of socioeconomic equality among native born.
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This problem is not isolated to Japan. Countries all across the world are facing the same issue and have been for a number of years.
Create a shitty, miserable, society with no rights or support, and people do not want to bring children into it.... who'd guess?
The flannel has been wrung dry to the detriment of the working class; there is no where to go, no more water to squeeze from them. This is global society / capitalism falling apart.
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Exactly its not some mysterious problem no matter how much the government and media try to frame it as one, people of the age to have kids have no time for kids and no money for kids so no wonder they have no desire for kids.
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Even if they did want children, without the support systems, it may not be feasible for them to have kids. Having them might mean choosing to starve or go without a house.
Even if you're in a country with a public health care system, a sick/young child means having to take time off work to care for them.
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Countries all across the world
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate
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Capitalism is the best we've got. Even North Korea has acknowledged this. With other systems people starve en masse. My hope is that we get over the taboo of regulation. Capitalism fucks up real-estate and wealth distribution. And health-care should 100% be government funded.
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It seems like you already understand some of the limitations of capitalism. Look into why regulation has gradually been rolled back in the US since the 70s. Why did politicians start to agree with corporate execs demands for lower regulation. Keywords to look up - regulatory capture.
On a separate point, there's plenty of famines that have occurred in capitalist economies due to capitalist exploitation - that is make more money, at the cost of of creating a famine. Some estimates put the deaths due to famines under capitalism higher than those under socialism. I used to simply know only of the famines under socialism and not know of the famines under capitalism.
Finally the capitalism we live in since the Great Depression is significantly different than the capitalism before it. Socialists, actual Marxists in western counties, yes the US included, were actively involved in the policies that created the welfare states across the west along with the regulatory regime. Some of FDR's economic advisors were Marxian economists.
That was the compromise to save capitalism from imminent worker revolution. The unregulated, no-safety-net version of the system had lead to the conditions for such revolution. The socialist policies that averted the revolution in have slowly been dismantled over time and the system is reverting to the pre-Great Depression state. Faster in some countries than others.
If you want to reform capitalism to the point where it can no longer revert to economic liberalism (free market fundamentalism), you'd have to almost completely eliminate wealth accumulation. You could only do that by changing the ownership of the means of production. E.g. all employees in all corporations become equal owners (or controllers) of the machines and therefore the decisions on sharing the wealth those machines produce, instead of those decisions being made by a tiny number of major shareholders. You'd also have to significantly expand the industries operated by the government. At that point you end up with socialism. And yes socialism doesn't mean central planning and no markets. Capitalism doesn't mean no central planning and just markets. We do plenty of central planning in capitalist economies across governments and large corporations.
I'm not asking you to change your mind today. Just pointing out a few things to look into in case you haven't.
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Japan will literally collapse into fire before they allow immigration
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Well, that's why Western right wingers look to Japan. But the difference is that, Western right wingers are looking to regress back into the olden days when women were baby-churners, whereas I don't hear from Japan wanting the same (there are some but they are not significant enough to sway public opinion).
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It’s easier to immigrate to Japan than the United States. There are lots of work visas and long term residency can be pretty quick with a professional position. Many of the clerks you see in Japan for ordinary jobs are immigrants from South Asia.
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Yeah, I can think of people of many different colors and varieties who would jump at the chance to go over there and help with whatever work they need doing for a decent wage.
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No one has time for family in Japan
When I watch yt videos about people leaving the workplace at 10pm, I wonder how suicide rate isn't way higher
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This. I think there's so much to love about Japan, especially the cultural leaning towards doing everything with respect, dignity, and skill.
But the megacorpos definitely won in exploiting that, and the general social pressure revolving around workplace culture there is genuinely terrifying to me.
As a US person, our corporate-brainwash culture is awful too, but I'm glad we're seeing bigger working class pushes to tell our employers "Go kick rocks. My family is more important."
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America has a individualist culture. Thats why we have unions and stuff (for now, anyway..) and don't have to blow our bosses ego until 11pm every night.
Japan has a very..conformity driven culture. You conform to expectations around you, or you get ostracized heavily and treated like an outsider.
Which is a big driver for this kind of "I ahve to work till 5, then drink with my boss/coworkers until midnight, because if I dont I'll lose my job and be ostracized" stuff.
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There is no dignity or respect to the worker by the sound of it
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It's got nothing to do with megacorps, that's just run of the mill Japanese culture/society.
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There's a reason so much anime these days is a salaryman dying on the job and reincarnating into a fantasy world.
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I think I like the premise a bit more than the show. Zom 100 is about a kid who starts a soul crushing office job only to become the happiest guy alive after the zombie apocalypse starts and he realizes he doesn’t need to go to work anymore.
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Huge amount of japanese descent people in Brazil (including me), but I have the feeling the japanese would rather have their country implode than give us nationality
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You mean, people of Brazilian descent in Japan?
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alot of asian countries, china, korea are very similar. china only allows less than 20k/year to become citizens, thier stipulation is you giving up your citizenship of other countries.
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That is still miles better than japan, I could actually work towards that. To get japanese citizenship I would need to be born again
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I live and work in Japan, and it definitely is not a very condusive environment for younger Japanese people to have children. My wife and I are both foreigners, and we are in out late 30's and just had our first. The country has some really great benefits and support services for having children, but we definitely would not be able to do this if we worked for Japanese companies, and with the Japanese work mentality.
While it IS getting better, work being the central pillar of life and the expectations from the older generations are still very much a thing. The long hours of paper pushing, the culture of promotion based on age and time served rather than innovation and hard work takes a toll on people. If you are not living in the office in your 20s to show your dedication, you are looked down upon, at least accoridng to my Japanese friends.
Immigration could help fix some of this. Japan is a desireable, largely affordable country, that is safe when it comes to raising children. Living here as a foreigner though has specific challenges, and your job prospects are pretty poor unless you are lucky, and access to housing and just general living can be challenging, even if you can speak Japanese.
I just got a new job in Kyoto, and I currently live in Tokyo. I would say around 40% of the houses we applied to look at would not even let us see the properties because we are foreigners. That's 100% legal and totally ok to say here, and I take that in stride. In Australia (where I am from), they would either just tell you to piss off, or show you the property knowing you don't have a chance, so at least they are upfront about it here I guess. Getting a credit card is a massive ordeal, which you kinda need here because debit cards are increasingly hard to find, and they don't even work for all bills and systems, and getting a bank account ... it all just snowballs.
Also anything outside of the major cities is kinda dead. I love it, but living and thriving there in places that have more space that would probably promote having big families, is nearly impossible, or at least impossibly boring. This is not unique to Japan, Australia is largely the same outside of the main cities.
Not sure what the fix is. But annecdotally I see these articles all the time, and yet there are kids and younger families always around, so not sure if it is as serious as they are saying, or more media hype?
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I've always had this silly dream of running a large, wealthy tech company, and attempting a startup in Japan, not reliant on business with other Japanese companies, that promotes a healthier work culture, and then stuffs the high productivity results in the faces of other companies. As a stretch goal, it could even locate out in the burbs, with an investment in better infrastructure access.
Japan has so many great things about it, but the major points around banking, sexism, and seniority really twist the image.
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Lived in Japan for many years, came back to the USA for many of the reasons you touch on. I knew a few foreigners who had non-English-teacher type jobs, but mostly, it was English teacher or English juku owner. The systemic issues, for young Japanese and for foreigners, in Japan really need to be dealt with if they have any hope of slowing their population decline. So, not going to happen.
Japan is never going to have enough immigration to significantly impact the population decline. Even back in the early 2000s, it would have taken millions of immigrants a year. Now, forget about it.
Living in inaka is not bad but not great either, for most people. So, tiny apartments in or near big cities or large houses in the middle of nowhere are pretty much the choices. Jobs in inaka? Fisherman, elderly care, sakaya, maybe some other generic retail for the eldest sons who couldn't escape. And, of course, government jobs.
Re: media hype, yes there are still young people. But not enough. Societies need 2.1(-ish) children per couple to maintain population equilibrium. Japan, South Korea, Italy, and several other wealthy nations are way below that. Add in the Japanese propensity to live for a long time, and Logan's Run becomes more and more thinkable each year. When the population pyramid becomes whatever shape parallel lines || are, the economics of a modern, wealthy society break down.
I gave a PD session for Japanese teachers back in like 2004 or so about why learning English would be helpful, because they might end up with a lot of immigrant children in their classes. (Or, I didn't say, because you could use your English skills to look for jobs outside of Japan.) Of course, immigration barely happened, and many of those teachers are probably close to retirement age by now. So, my bad, I guess. Someone should do that PD today, because the situation is even worse now.
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I am lucky enough to not have an English teaching job, and never have. But unless you are highly specialized, or somehow manage to start your own thing here, there seems to be limite scope as a foreigner to really have a strong career.
I am actually moving to Shiga Prefecture in a few days. It's going to be a big change from living on the outskirts of Tokyo for the past six years. Excited to see how my perception of life in Japan changes from the move.
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Its hyped by FT and more economy driven outlets because it makes them nervous. The replacement rate of births was always enough to support retirement pension plans. Now it's not.
Japan is way ahead of the curve on this inevitable trend than other countries so it will be really interesting see how it adjusts and what markets are affected by this.
In terms of buying a house, is remote work really not a thing in Japan? Living in a remote village sounds lime a dream. Otherwise, are there no towns/villages where foreigners sort of band together and are allowed to buy property? Just curious about how Japan functions
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Part of my YouTube diet is English-speaking expat YouTubers who live in Japan (UK, US, Canada, Australia), and just based on what they have shared there are some firms that specialize in property searches by foreigners. Not like "buy up a Japanese town and make it Australian", just networking with more open-to-foreigner Japanese, and being an interface with foreigners to help them learn to integrate.
Like everywhere in the world, remote villages in Japan lack services. From restaurants to health care to home supplies, it's more time consuming and expensive to get some things, and others are just not available. From the YouTubers I watch, the community connections enabled by the great mass transit and walkable urban areas in much of Japan (though not all - some parts ate the car-centric pill) are what keep them there, and the friction to maintaining friendships from a rural area has pushed several to move to Tokyo.
As far as "how is Japan adjusting" to population decline, elder care sucks. A lot of people die alone unnoticed (kodokushi). Markets adjust to lower supply of workers (Japan is at the cutting edge of automation), but quality of life for seniors can't be automated.
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In the context of Capitalism, sure, Japan is in trouble.
But then again, any system that demands infinite growth within a finite system has a biological parallel… in cancer. Yes, capitalism is economic cancer.
Japan has a bright future in front of it, if it can successfully pioneer an effective degrowth system that prioritizes the lives of people over Paraiste-Class profits.
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Outside of capitalism it is hard to function below replacement level because the young people have to take care of the elderly
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Oh no, having to spend time with my family oh nooo /s
If rent weren't so damn high and you didn't have such a squeeze on every moment of your life to make as much money too survive, spending time and supporting each other efficiently maybe wouldn't be a problem.
Values are defined by our parents? Is it a caste system? Is extended family more or less efficient? What is the goal: sustainability, B R E E D I N G, vacations, wealth compared to others, power over others, power over ourselves? Etc....
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No they don't. They just have to adopt a culture of euthanasia. I don't say that to be cruel or indifferent. I assume state assisted programs are in a lot of countries' futures assuming they can stomach it. It's not something I'm advocating for. I just think the rich are cold enough to push it to try to fix the problem.
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Japans GDP has been almost flat since the mid 90s, they are not following the west's """infinite""" growth. Not that I'm saying capitalism isn't part of the problem, it absolutely is, just saying it isn't the entire story.
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everyone keeps repeating that cancer metaphor, but a plague is much more appropriate….
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It can, but will it?
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Is cancer really cancer if the rest of the body can adapt and grow faster than it? You describe capitalism as a finite system and then heavily imply that we’re near the outer boundary of that system or that all current and future resources are almost depleted.
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The fact that our planet's resources are finite is a matter of physics. Capitalism may come up with some innovation or another that adds more lifespan to it, the way that digital spaces and the financial industry have done, or it may have another global war that creates room for a new period of traditional growth at the cost of countless lives, but it will inevitably hit an insurmountable wall.
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I still don't understand the obsession. Not everything has to be a ponzi scheme where line go up. Things can shrink, it's ok. Not everything lasts forever. At some point you can abandon areas and let them decay.
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I fully agree, but also, the whole concept of a pension plan only works if the next generation pays it forwards. Meaning this generation is paying for the current retired group, and no one will pay for them.
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I mean, the way things are now we'll be living 3-4 generations in a household anyway.
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Thats not necessarily true. Pension just needs the economy to grow and even with less people the economy can be stimulated through technology. If 1 japanese with technology can produce product equivalent of 1950s 3 Japanese than that's growth.
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You make the mistake of assuming that pension plans have to be paid by the next generation. Why not use a wealth tax instead?
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Agree so much with this perspective. I'll never forget idly watching some financial section on the news with the newscaster, ashen faced, reporting that growth in some industry had slowed, as though someone had died.
Then I thought about it... So wait, it's still profitable, and that profit is even still increasing, but the rate of increase is slowing!?
People are still going to work, product is being made, profits still reaped, but the greedy ambitions of those at the top aren't being completely fulfilled!??
Well bless my bleeding heart... What a crock of shit.
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This is just like a stock crashing because the quarterly profits did not exceed the very high growth expectations more than a lot, they only exceeded a little.
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And also, new technology is still being developed
So it's not even that all progress has stopped, things are still moving forwards
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Theres a difference between going down, falling down and crashing down
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Isn't there a protection where there may not be any new Japanese births by 2050? That they'll essentially cease to be (pure Japanese)?
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Not everything has to be a ponzi scheme where line go up.
Yeah sure my personal cup of coffee is not a ponzi scheme AFAIK.
But global capitalism? Definitely a ponzi scheme 100%. Literally destroying the planet to prop it up.
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If the Japanese want people to work 80 hour weeks (and go drinking with their boss every night) maybe they should make polyamorous marriage a thing. Kids are a lot easier to deal with if you have help.
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From what i heard from people and read online, i really don't understand how people even do that. Japanese work etiquette is bananas. But that aside, my job is somewhat high demand, but i draw the line at work hours. I work 42 hours a week and not a second longer. That opens up enough times for some hobbies, enough free time and everything. But if i had kids, most of that would be gone. So if you're a work horse, you're expected to give up everything, except work and raising kids.
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Literally: they don't go home, that's how
Hearing about salary men sleeping on the streets or in train stations is one thing, but when I actually finally saw them in person it broke my fucking brain
Imagine the homelessness issues of a major Californian city but instead of homeless people it's a bunch of clearly drunk dudes in suits who all vanish by morning
My wife cried hard because the realization hit that hard
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That's certainly a take on "family business".
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Yeah. Only rich people should have exclusive access to women.
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this story comes out every so often about japan, rarely if ever mentions (slightly) lower births per woman in italy, china, spain, or the same 1.3 as e.g. poland, finland, canada
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?most_recent_value_desc=false
those are 2022 figures but i doubt there's been significant change
there's basically no first world country above the 2.1 replacement rate
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I'd say all those EU (and Canada) countries aren't striving to be the economic powerhouse that Japan is and China already has 1.5 billion people compared to Japan's 125 million. Plus most countries rely on immigration to make up the difference while I've heard (but maybe not true) that Japan is hard to immigrate to due to the disapproving culture toward foreigners.
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The weird thing is that once you get a foot in the door, Japanese immigration policies actually aren't that strict. You just need a guarantor (company) to be willing to hire you.
The language barrier and hesitancy of companies to hire non-Japanese is the actual barrier, not so much the immigration policies themselves. The government could ofcourse encourage companies to hire foreigners...but Japan changes at a glacial pace.
I'm sure they'll be ready to deal with the new world under trump by 2035-40
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fair enough. i picked those out as sort of 'mainstream' countries that this kind of article doesn't get published about, while i've seen them about japan a few times now. be interesting to contrast immigration rates to countries with similarly difficult language and cultural barriers but that's a bigger job i haven't the time for now
to this article's credit it does end with a couple of paragraphs on the korean government attempts to support "work-family balance, childcare and housing"
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Europe has strong immigration policies and can easily correct if needed. Italy is already outsourcing most of elderly care to other Europeans - who's caring for Japan's elderly?
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A lot of countries are headed there. America isn't keeping their population growth in the replacement category either. Why do you think abortion and immigration are such an issue in America? They want the white people reproducing, not the immigrants. Wherever there is a super strict, racist or almost racist, immigration policy, look at their population growth.
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nothing about the idea of having children appeals to me in the slightest
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Everyone has their opinions and circumstances, but anecdotally my time with children has been some of the happiest.
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Me neither 😆 and now my son is 5 y old
We discovered him about 4 month after creation…
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Cultural norms around marriage and work-life balance are strangling Japan’s future. Good article, minus one for not exploring innovative or radical solutions to the crisis.
🐱🐱🐱🐱
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Its monetary policy that has done it. The lost decade and all that, caused by the central banks via loose monetary policy.
Had they let prices correct normally it may have been fixed, instead zombie corporations subsist on the back of the government.
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Japan will prefer to extinguish itself rather than breaking up with tradition on those cultural points or work ethic and marriage/child rearing
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Taiwanese family living in Taiwan and frequent Japan prior to having kids and after having kids.
Most people are quick to point out the gruesome work culture, but honestly, that is just a small part of the total issue.
1- Japanese people culturally hate outsiders. So their immigration system is setup to almost never give a foreigner citizenship.
2- Japanese people culturally have a mindset that if you pop one out, it's you and only you that share that burden. That means that if you're on a train and struggling with a crying toddler that is tired of standing, nobody and I mean nobody will let you have their seat. Half the patrons will turn up their volume on their headset and the other half with mean mug/glare at you for annoying them. You wanna know the worst part. This mindset transcends to the kid's grandparents. That's right. The grandparents will not lift a finger to help you.
Edit: I also want to add that the burden is not even on the father, outside of the finances. The father does not need to help with any baby duties. I have met many Japanese men that has kids that has never even changed a diaper. Why the fuck would a Japanese woman want to have kids?
3- The government is not making it easy to help the families. Do you have a sleeping kid in a stroller? Well, you better hold the kid if you're using mass transit. Elevators are an afterthought. So once you get off a train, you either have to walk an extreme distance to get to an elevator or in some instances there isn't even an elevator at all. In some rare occasion there is a designated elevator for strollers and wheel chair access, it's jammed packed with people who is able-bodied and can take the escalator, all of which won't exit the elevator to let people with wheel chairs or strollers in.
I went to Osaka Universal studios and ask to rent a stroller. The guy didn't speak English at all. We eventually used my phone to translate and he asked me my kids age. I said 5. He said, is today his birthday? I said no. He turned 5 a few weeks ago. He then poceeds to deny me from renting a stroller. I reasoned with him telling him my kid is having major jet lag and needs a place to sleep right now. He told me to just go back to the hotel to sleep because he wasn't going to rent a stroller to me.
I love Japan and the Japanese people, but honestly they all hate kids.
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This was very insightful, thank you for sharing!
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As someone who has always heard how nice Japanese people are, I'm surprised they hate kids that much.
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They are courteous and very respectful. It's built into the culture and even their language. One simple sentence like hello, how are you have multiple ways of saying it depending on who you're addressing. Addressing incorrectly is very disrespectful. So the culture overly respectful.
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After all this you still love Japan and Japanese people?
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Yes absolutely. The Japanese has a heavy influence in Taiwan culture. They ruled Taiwan for 50 years. My grandparents only spoke Japanese and Taiwanese when I was growing up here.
That is why there is so much love for the Japanese people. Our cultures are pretty aligned.
What we different is how we view kids in society. In Taiwan, when my wife was visably pregnant, people from all walks of life would give up their seat for her. Even before she was visably pregnant, the government gives you a ribbon to wear and people will let you go first on an elevator and congratulate you.
The government has designated parking spots(marked in pink lines) specifically for pregnant and anyone with kids 6 and under. All larger malls are required to have a clean breastfeeding/pumping room with some malls going the extra mile and having free childcare while you pump.
The people in Taiwan view children as everyone children and everyone has an obligation to bare that burden.
While there are major upsides, the downsides is that people have opinions on how to parent your kids with some parenting for you.
I was in Kaohsiung at a beach and my 3 year old son was taking a stick and hitting it against rocks and the sand. A bunch of grandma's felt it was too unsafe for my son to be walking around with a stick in his hand and took it out of my kid's hands and told me that my kid could lose an eye. I know the gesture comes from a good place, but man. Mind your own business.
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All people are wired to 'hate' outsiders. Countries are forced to open up in order to keep economic growth going. The US needs to import people in order to keep the growth going on. The same with Western Europe. Japan basically took the economic stagnation and said no to opening itself up. I wonder whether that was mostly a top-down sort of decision or not.
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Oh no, not our out of control population growth fueled by resources running out as I type this comment and causing unspeakable damage to the biosphere of the planet.
Whatever will we do if our numbers fall below 7 billion.
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I don't disagree, but the systems necessary to make this happen non-destructively just do not exist.
BTW, you may like the limits to growth study. https://archive.org/details/TheLimitsToGrowth
Although it is kind of a downer. In the 70s, they predicted the downfall of society. We're on track with the prediction, more or less.
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If you want people to actually be able to have a family, you need to enable that. My understanding of Japanese society is that you have medium to no personal freedom over how you spend your time, and meeting people is difficult. It feels like they are so intent on shooting themselves in the foot, and then complaining about their foot hurting.
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Even countries that try to enable it don't renew their population, no matter the level of socio-economic equality.
The only way you're reversing the trend is by taking rights from women and I sure hope you don't want that.
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No, that would be barbaric. But even if you can't fix birthrates quickly, if you don't have women and partners in positions where they feel like they can safely have kids, you're going to compound the issue. My understanding is they've had this cultural issue where if you want to work as a woman that kind of really negatively impacts your career long term, and in terms of long term financial security that's awful.
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I love Japan, but I will say it has its issues that often get overlooked. Workplace culture is horrific in Japan and it contributes to their high suicide rates. There's even a word in Japanese that specifically refers to a person dying from being overworked. I know friends who immigrated to Japan, only to regret it because they saw for themselves just how harsh the workplace culture was. Japanese people have no time for their family. Something must change or this problem is going to get worse but given it's a highly conservative culture I'm not sure it's going to see changes anytime soon.
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Jokes on you
America has higher rates of overwork and suicide!
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Yeah but it's not exactly fair to compare the US to a developed country
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It has two actually, karoshi and karojisatsu, death from being overworked and suicide from being overworked. Etimologically speaking, that gives you some idea of how big the problem is, kind of like the old adage about eskimos or inuits having six words for "snow".
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Known I am a bit obtuse, or perhaps litteral, but I am Norwegian and have more words for snow. Think English have more words for snow. Think texture. Powder, sleet, sugary, slush, crusty, hoar, rime.
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Why is their workplace harsh?
Is it conservative because old people outnumber the young people and have for so long? You give a dominant demographic enough influence over time, they'll try to make the rest of society like them. Old.
Also, is it so old because Japan has a really high life expectancy? Or has that been taken into account?
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It’s cultural. Japanese are less individualistic than the west. They live their lives that is more geared toward what will help the community and not just themselves. Less than hundred years ago they viewed their emperor as a living god. So back then the Japanese were indoctrinated to live their lives in service of the emperor. Basically how North Koreans treat their leader today, which is a cultural remnant from Japan since Korea was a Japanese colony. (That the imperial family are descendants from gods is an 8th century myth and was reintroduced during the Meiji restoration. Before the Meiji restoration the Japanese didn’t give a fuck about the imperial family)
So that cultural attitude still lives today in a watered down form. Instead of serving the emperor it’s about serving the community and country. And of course corporations can’t help themselves but to exploit that. That attitude has been fading with every generation after the war but it’s still so deeply ingrained that corporations can easily manipulate their workers.
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Turns out isolationist culture doesn't stand the test of time. Who knew?
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It did for a few hundred years before they became a vassal state of the US .. and wouldn't you know it the US is also in a birth rate crisis.
Isolationist culture is fine, you just can't mix it with the crushing reality of capitalism and it's negative effects on the ability of people to raise families.
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I'm sure artificially lowering female med student's grades to increase drop-outs amoung women will help with the financial stability and job security needed to raise a child!
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There's also no support for women with children there, career wise
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South Korea allows women to be fired if they 1) want, or 2) have children.
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Experts blamed fewer marriages in recent years due to the fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic…
It’s 2025. Can we please stop using Covid as a catch-all excuse?
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I’ll have you know I intend to keep using Covid as an excuse for bad decisions well into 2040
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Same here! This morning’s hangover, as just one example, 100% attributable to Covid! Definitely not the decision to have highballs #5-8 last night.
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one finger on the monkey's paw curls
Millennials are ruining the marriage industry!
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fear of decline
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Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
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Clearly solid, factual, data there.
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Damn there must be so much evolution now
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I hear that welcoming migrants is a great way to address this problem...
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incoherent Japanese screeching
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Good. We need to depopulate by 50%. The earth can't have 8 billion people. There are less than 30,000 polar bears in the whole world.
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Another insane figure: wild mammals make up only 4% of all mammal biomass in the world, the other 96% is humans and our livestock. That 4% includes all whales, elephants, bears, etc.
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Sorry, can't do that under capitalism perpetual growth
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line must go up forever
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I know the left really (and rightfully) hates capitalism, but this isn't a capitalism problem; it's a society problem. You'll always need a certain amount of labor to sustain non-working portions of the populations. Thanks to advances in technology the necessary working person percentage is decreasing but you still can't have the majority of the population be elderly people who will never again be productive.
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Carrying capacity of the earth is something like 15 billion with current technology, our wastefulness and overconsumption (of the rich, globally speaking) is the problem. Which reduction in population can mitigate, but not fix
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Thats mainly indians and countries around and africans. Why people ignore this small little fact?
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They seem to be electing a lot of nationalist anti-immigration cucks. Maybe they should try to fix the problem instead of endlessly complaining about it.
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Expecting Japan to ever really throw off the yoke of the LDP is expecting too much.
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Give them some days off.
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Japanese workers get more days off than American workers.
Japan 26
USA 10
Japanese on average don't work longer than Americans (2017)
#39 United States 1,765.00
#43 Japan 1,738.36
Don't get me wrong, they have a crazy work culture, but it's worse in the USA.
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I believe Japan has less inequality than the US. Not sure on that, but I think it's true. I think in this case we see work culture playing a role. The only country in the world with a worse work culture than the US is Japan. No one has time to even think about having kids when you are a company man there. It's similar in the US.
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Even as economist talk about the Lost Decade (really, two decades) in Japan, the unemployment rate has always been relatively subdued compared to the US:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRUN25TTJPA156N
From about 1.7% in 1990, and then two spikes that just about reach 5.0% in 2002 and 2009. Not only that, but that's the range for people 25-54 years old, which isn't equivalent to the headline number typical in the US. There is an equivalent in published US data, and you can see it's much higher and spikier than Japan:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14000060
This doesn't mean everything is OK for the working class in Japan. Housing prices are astronomical, requiring 100 year multi-generational loans. Working culture is also far more stressful. However, I think it's fair to ask who the "Lost (two) Decades" is really affecting.
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It really is. In the US I mean. I work 6 days a week 9 am till whenever the fuck I'm done. Sometimes at 1pm and some nights I'm not home by 7pm.
Luckily I've negotiated less work orders on Saturday later in the morning so I have some kind of decline of work towards the end of the week. It took six years of constant work to get even that. Otherwise it's 7 work orders a day and I drive around 150 miles a day. (I work in household appliance repair. So I travel from home to home.)
It's a thankless job I get micromanaged in. The only advantage I have is that appliance repair techs are always in high demand because there's so few of us and I'm good at my job so my boss can't really fire me.
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The only country in the world with a worse work culture than the US is Japan
What about North Korea?
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This is why we need to do something now. Japan has been unable to offer enough of the right incentives to turn their birthrate around so how do we do any better? Act now. They waited until they had a problem before trying to turn it around and it hasn’t worked. Social and economic inertia is very difficult to turn but maybe if we start now, we can have different results. Japan never had much immigration to fall back on but we can use that to buy more time. We have a chance as long as we keep encouraging and welcoming immigration…… shit
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I'd be more interested in altering the material conditions that lead to low birth rates than relying on churning through the global population. We're already doing immigration like you said and have been. It still sucks to live in these conditions.
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Management issues... I know what can help... Introduce Agile.
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I still don't understand how a falling population leads to a society crumbling.
The only thing a reduction in population does is make domestic labor more expensive. If that increase in expense outpaces the product of your society, that's not on the population, that's on the sustainability of the society.
And that's only the capitalist way of looking at it.
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Supporting the older, non-working, population is expensive. You need enough workers paying in to those systems that support them.
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Yeah, and not only paying in but actually working the labour intensive health/elderly care jobs.
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Sure, but that still sounds like a self-correcting problem.
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That scheme sounds familiar. If you drew a diagram to represent the repayment of investments, does it resemble a geometric shape?
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In most places, because the economy needs to grow so it stays ahead of its growing loans and debt (overly simplified). To grow, you need more workers and customers. If population doesn't grow, and you don't have immigrants to do the producing and buying instead, things stagnate, very lower interest rates that the system can't really handle, government keeping the economy together with duct tape, general welfare not doing great what leads to even less population growth. But every place is a bit different and its own challenges of course.
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If population is decreasing because of decreased birthrate, then the population is aging. And all else equal, an aging population is less productive because fewer people are working.
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And that's a problem, how, exactly?
It means things change, because that's what humans do. We adapt. There are still 750k children born in Japan in 2024, vs 1.6m that died.
To me, it sounds like the obvious solution is to make life better for the young. That doesn't have to come at the cost of the old, but that's what the wealthiest will choose.
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It's not emmigration. If it was then what you said about labor prices is correct.
It's about too many old people who will die in the next decade and the lack of new babies to keep Japanese culture going
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In a world where you can automate everything it's not an issue.
We can't, so we need specialized labor to accomplish some tasks and not everyone has the potential to become specialized labor even if they're given the chance.
With people retiring and less people to take their place it becomes an issue, no matter how much you pay people, if there's no one to take a position then the seat stays empty.
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I agree with you 100%. Capitalists need to complete the logic loop: we’ve built amazing tech, machinery and processes to get incredible productivity gains and production of goods with less labor. So we should be able to get by with less labor, right?…
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So we should be able to get by with less labor, right?…
Sure. Or everyone could get more stuff for the same amount of labor.
Suppose your boss told you, "You've been doing a great job at work. We could give you 10% raise, or we could keep your paycheck the same and cut your hours by 10%." I don't know which you would choose, but most people would take the raise.
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What if the population is stabilizing? Unlimited growth is death. Anyone who thinks differently hasn't looked at how life works. That a population that undergoes a huge increase crashes due to starvation and disease. This is observable from bacteria to humans. It could be Japan is entering a stable period where needs and resources are predictable and known. Sounds like a higher standard of living to me. The downside is the huge geriatric population will need more and more resources until that situation becomes part of the new stable norm.
Stagnant is how a capitalist mindset sees it. They can't stand that since their scam depends on unlimited growth. So of course any take on this from the stand point of greed would think its a terrible thing for a population to shrink to fit its resources not keep growing to allow ever increasing profits.
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As an American (or at least a non Japanese native) if my boss came up to me yelling and swearing in my face I would punch him out cold.
Actually if more Japanese did this I think things would improve at the office.
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So you'd want to go to jail for a few months (several weeks at least) over someone yelling at you?
Shit I hope you don't get married or have a girlfriend or kids.
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Japanese are very against violence, and incidentally it's the safest first world country. And the work culture has been improving in the last decade or so - though not nearly fast enough.
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No you wouldn't, lol. You need your job for health care.
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Jokes on you, I don't have healthcare.
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yeah but then they’d end up killing all of the middle management….
yeah, it’s a good solution -
American culture really has mastered being both violent and fragile
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Punching people is illegal in general. If it was that easy, there wouldn't exist any class struggle.
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Easy, just make it legal.
Problem solved.
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People now realise that kids are a lot of hard work and fucking expensive.....and that yearly skiing holidays are fun.
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Inflation, daycare, and work-life balance are the complaints I hear most. A ton of the jobs and good education are in Tokyo so people want to be there. This overloads all the daycare and other systems. Since corona, the floodgates have opened on price increases and inflation. Since 3/11 energy costs have been rising and things with Russia also hit (after nuclear, tons of fuel is needed and is imported, often from Russia).
Having more things in other parts of the country that still paid well would help. Where I live (in Tohoku) daycare slots are plentiful and there are all kinds of subsidies for kids. The only jobs here, though, are fishery, forestry, agriculture, etc. My town is less bad because a lot was rebuilt after the tsunami, but the lack of people also means a lack of tax which also means infrastructure suffers. Rust and crumbling things everywhere.
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Is an element of this to do with sexism too? I haven't seen it mentioned but my understanding is women aren't treated well, particularly in the workplace, leading to wanting to stay single and childfree for a better life.
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The olds expect women to quit basically when they marry or get pregnant. Worker protections are better these days, but the view is still there with some. Some couples do have to have one spouse quit because of the whole daycare thing in some areas, though.
There is a wage gap between men and women and fewer women are in positions of power, though the latter at least is slowly getting better.
Not having a child won't cancel societal expectations of the older generations. Women are often still expected to serve tea and do other things in older/traditional companies.
My company is a westernized Japanese company and we do have a number of women including in higher roles (though none on the board, I think). I'm in a remote IT role so I don't generally hang out after work with non-IT staff to hear real opinions or the rumor mill, though.
My wife was treated well and fairly by her small japanese company, but she has experienced some discrimination previously.
In our village, we do have work we do in the community every month or two (mostly cutting grass, litter picking, and maintaining shared spaces). Some things are definitely typically done by the men or women with women doing the inside cleaning and cooking at events with men doing the outside work. We've already broken that mold some as I'm also the cook (I baked things to bring to our last event).
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Why not just promote immigration. America seems to not have that problem
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A culture of xenophobia
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Isn't Tokyo to be one of the most affordable major, developed cities in the world? The article suggests that Japanese homes are exceptionally expensive.
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The tradition in japan is to level a house and build a new one. It was explained to me that very few have multigenerational single family dwellings. This would increase cost.
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Get to work juice boys!
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They need a sexual revolution , people are too uptight and stuck into their societal norms. I
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its mostly working 80+hrs a week, plus you have to have drinks after work with the boss,+ all the busy work. and then theres the child rear aspect, woman recieves very little if any support for being a mom, often time its chatised. and lastly HCOL.
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week, plus you have to have drinks after work with the boss,+ all the busy work. and then theres the child rear aspect, woman recieves very little if any support for being a mom, often time its chatised. and lastly HCOL. Yes. The societal structure is too rigid and is collapsing. IMHO
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imagine being so racist that it forces your country to fall apart. they made their own bed, time for some laying in it.
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Its their country. Let them decide.
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yeah, racism is totally cool, if it isn’t here /s
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What are you even talking about?
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Japan is historically an extremely racist empire. That contributes to anti-immigration.
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one of the more racist nations on earth, i wish them a very happy depopulation and dissolution.. kampai!
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While I do not share the sentiment of "let them finally die", I am very curious what will win: wanting to survive as a country and society or that bullshit worldview they are known for by anyone who learns anything more about Japan than just cool tech-anime-sake combo
I do hope they will change and survive. Ikkyu Sojun has earned a very special place in my heart (the one, who was a monk, son of emperor, who got a particular letter from his mother that is now famous among anyone who learns anything about Buddhism in Japan)
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I'm here to spread my seed.
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I know, let's all move to Japan. Cheap real estate and no Cheeto.
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Should they bring millions of indians, africans and arabs to help them? We are seeing how its working wonderfully in the west.
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I didn't get your comment. It sounds like you think that's been bad, but immigration in the US and Europe have been successful ways to grow population and workforce, and the biggest problem has been that exploited nativists keep radicalizing and threatening these people.
That's a problem, but it's not actually caused by having too many immigrants.
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Try "to function as a society" when the biosphere becomes unlivable. The biggest and root cause of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is human overpopulation:
- https://phys.org/news/2023-04-population-growth-main-driver-carbon.html
- https://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2017/07/co2_saved/giv-3902H9Q7lx2HE5M7/
The fact that the biggest and root cause of a mass extinction event is being reduced, is a good thing.
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This is not true, check out this podcast: https://youtu.be/Tk-XLP4PRNs
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Only morons think we're overpopulated.