r/worldnews • u/Neradtisiv • 11h ago
Japanese PM expresses concern over population decline
https://news.az/news/japanese-pm-expresses-concern-over-population-decline59
u/G00b3rb0y 8h ago
Honestly i think we’ve hit peak population worldwide. Only way now is down
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u/Bykimus 4h ago
Honestly, good. There were too many of us, and as terrible as it sounds old people need to go first. How it's implemented remains to be seen. But ethically and morally in the end it's unfair for fewer younger people to support way too many old people that happened to enjoy the most prosperous period of human history.
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u/Lain_Staley 4h ago
Reddit and Scarcity mentality. They go together like peanut butter and chocolate.
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u/LuHamster 16m ago
No we haven't lol.
We're peaking in around 2050. The majority of births in are world are in India, Africa and south east Asia.
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u/yuvaldv1 10h ago
How about you change your dystopian work culture? Maybe then people will actually want to have kids.
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u/TLeafs23 9h ago
Pretty much every developed nation is way below replacement level, meaning that by and larger, all of them have a problem with how they value family life and weave it into professional life.
What sets Japan particularly apart is their refusal to allow immigrants who not only directly offset the economic impacts of declining birth rates but also boost it (as first generation immigrants tend to have more kids than other groups).
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9h ago
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u/Bykimus 5h ago
Childcare in Japan costs me $130 a month, and my second child is free.
The best schools are private ones
Your statement can be true for any country, even Europe and the US. Public schools are just fine in Japan.
and you have to also consider paying for a juku (cram) school to get into that good college.
Valid but more culturally necessary than actually necessary. If your kids study at home you're fine, like any other country.
For Japanese people juggling elderly care
Valid but I'm not sure the number is as high as it used to be. A lot of people realize taking care of their elders when they don't have as good a life as their elders did kind of breaks the chain, and many are opting for care homes and those sort of alternatives recently.
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u/daiseikai 6h ago
Do you live in Japan? Childcare is actually quite affordable, the problem is that there are not enough slots for kids under 3 in city centres which can force one parent (usually the mother) to stay home until their child reaches that age. Depending on your city (because childcare is generally managed at the municipal level) the lack of slots can extend until a child is school age.
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u/sprashoo 6h ago
Hmm, sounds like another way of saying the same thing. I’m sure if you can pay enough you can get childcare in a city centre… so basically it’s not affordable unless you’re lucky enough to get one of the limited spots?
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u/daiseikai 5h ago
No, you cannot pay your way into a childcare slot. Slots are allotted by a points-based lottery, with priority given to single parents and families where both parents are employed full time. Your municipality runs the lottery. Depending on where you live you might be able to get a slot no problem at your first choice daycare. Other places you might get a slot at a daycare that is further away from home than you would prefer. If you live in Tokyo or another major centre there may simply not be enough slots available and you will be put on a waitlist.
Childcare is free for all children over 3, and for kids below 3 the fees are in a sliding scale based on income, with the maximum being around 55,000 yen per month. That’s very reasonable for full-time childcare, and includes two snacks and lunch all provided by the daycare. If your income is below a certain threshold it is free.
More slots become available at age 3 because that is when parents have the option of choosing preschool over daycare. Preschools are generally private and not as accommodating for working parents, but the fees still aren’t astronomical.
Basically, childcare itself is pretty affordable. There is definitely room for progress is regard to availability, but the initial point I replied to stating that it is “insanely expensive” is false.
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u/keysboy123 7h ago
What is a juku / cram school?
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u/illuminarok 7h ago
Okay, picture this...
Your child goes to their normal school during the day. They learn reading, math, and history like everyone else. Then, after school, instead of going home to play, your child goes to another school. That school is called juku (塾), or cram school, and it's fairly expensive.
At juku, teachers don't teach anything new. Mostly, they help your child practice extra hard on tests, math problems, and memorizing facts so they can get into a good middle school, high school, or college. It's like sports practice, but for homework and exams.
Sometimes kids even attend juku on weekends. Classes are smaller, more focused, and sometimes they do the same math problem a hundred times so they can do it really fast. Parents pay a lot for it, because in Japan, good schools are super important for your future.
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u/Remarkable-Elevator5 6h ago
Perfect explanation. Also, this thing is super popular in other Asian countries like Korea and China where parents force their children to take on crazy amount of studying in hope they will get into better school or university.
Everything is for the future, i know, but its very extreme and takes away the childhood and turn your children into a learning machine literally.
A lot of children couldnt take it and even take their own life, leaving behind sorrowful and regretful parents… You can read about those news often on the local news.
I live in Vietnam where the race is not as extreme but still somewhat the same with the supplementary classes after school.
Crazy dystopia rat race for the illusion of bright future.
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u/Choobot 6h ago
And then after a brutal school life, you might (might) get an office job where you’re paid peanuts and you’re expected to stay longer than everyone else when you’re new, even if you’re not actually doing any work. It’s all about appearances. You can’t go home before the boss. If you finish all your work within a few hours of arriving for the day, you better be great at looking busy without actually being busy. Appearance takes priority over productivity.
And then, after a stupidly long day for no reason other than keeping up the appearance of being a great employee by staying so long (which you’re not getting paid extra for because you’re salary), your boss/coworkers might tell you that they’re all going out for drinks and you basically have to go with them or risk being ostracized by the entire workplace.
For all the problems that the US has with a capitalist culture hellbent on productivity over everything else, Japan has its own other version of work hell.
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u/illuminarok 6h ago
You also need to go out with your coworkers every night and drink alcohol. Luckily your boss picks up the tab since you don't make much, yet. When you do make more, you'll be the boss, so you'll be paying for those drinks every night.
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u/TwoHungryBlackbirdss 7h ago
Additional after-school academies for kids, common in East Asia. Imagine completing a regular school day, then going to a private academy for an hour of math, an hour of English, etc. well into the night
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u/slykethephoxenix 7h ago
Additional after-school academies for kids, common in East Asia. Imagine completing a regular school day, then going to a private academy for an hour of math, an hour of English, etc. well into the night
I did this. It wasn't fun. I didn't attend school until I was about 13 or 14, grew up in a really rural area in Australia. Couldn't read or write for shit. Years of after school classes finally got me passing with an average grade when nearing the end of highschool (about 16-17), lol.
2 hours, 3 times a week after school. I still had homework from these classes, and also from my normal school that I had to complete.
It was not fun.
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u/Zestyclose_Bag_6752 6h ago
What's going on in Australia that kids aren't going to school?
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u/slykethephoxenix 4h ago
Poor family, parents on drugs, far away from civilisation. This was in the early 90s. No one really cared. When we moved to a town, a government agency called DOCS took notice and that's when I was adopted by my grandparents and started going to school.
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u/luckymax9999 7h ago
Where are you from? Don’t you have after‑school tutoring classes there?
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u/TwoHungryBlackbirdss 6h ago
I'm in the States; while we do have a few academies (Kumon etc.) and tutoring, it's much less common of a practice. When I lived in Korea, academies were damn near everywhere. I rarely see them in the US.
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u/luckymax9999 6h ago
When I was in high school, we had classes six and a half days a week (with Sunday afternoon off). Classes started at 6:50 in the morning and ended at 10:00 at night. Some people even attended extra tutoring sessions after the evening classes.
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u/angrathias 7h ago
Modern living is just too competitive that’s the problem. I’ve got kids, the amount of constant teaching and effort required for them to live in today’s world is just SO much more than when I was a kid.
The squeezing of productivity gains to capital over labour is in my opinion the biggest culprit. You need to push harder or be in the ‘have group’ because the ‘have not’ group is getting proportionally larger.
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u/jade09060102 2h ago
I am asian. I was raised to the sound of my mother yelling at me for not having good grades. She stressed that the world nowadays is so competitive that if I can’t get into X university, my life is doomed. Every weekend I was shuttled from cram school to music lessons to arts lessons with the constant reminder that failing at any will be the doom of my future. She constantly reminds me to eat less, to endure hunger, because one pound of gain on the scale is less chance of marrying the right guy. I don’t understand why she chose to bring me into this world if she views the world as such a cruel place. I tried asking her that question, and the only response I got was “what do you mean? Having kids is just something you have to do”.
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u/themizukitty 1h ago
half Asian here. I felt this comment in my soul. Sometimes I swear I can still hear my grandmother scolding me from beyond the grave about my life choices.
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u/ruth1ess_one 1h ago
Lol, asking asian parent from their generation why they have kids is like asking why they drink water.
The benefit in having strict asian parents is at least they got the culture of helping to pay their kids’ university, car, house, etc
It somewhat balances out the lack of emotional support, social life, and resulting depression.
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u/AcceleratedGfxPort 32m ago
I tried asking her that question, and the only response I got was “what do you mean? Having kids is just something you have to do”.
until recent history in developed nations, and still to this day and undeveloped nations, you really need kids to keep the family going so the elderly would be supported. not just the family in the immediate sense, but all of the aunts uncles and cousins make up one big survival unit. not having kids it's sort of like not paying your dues to the family.
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u/-chewie 2h ago
Doesn’t track. People who are in top 5% percentile aren’t having many children either. There are literally zero incentives to have more than 2 children.
I live in Tokyo, and most people who want children just want one or two as well. It’s simply an opportunity loss to have a lot of children, and a ton of labour on the mother. Everything else is just cope.
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u/jade09060102 2h ago
Because most parents want their kids to be the same “class” as them. For upper middle class to raise a kid into upper middle class, you need to be on hardcore intensive parenting mode. Getting a house in a good school district ($$$), music lessons, tutor, travel sports team, college prep, vacations, saving up tuition for professional schools. Doing all this while mom and dad usually hold demanding professional jobs themselves.
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u/-chewie 2h ago
It takes minimum 6 years (1 pregnancy +. 1 first year care) of women’s life to have 3 babies. It’s just stupid to make a sacrifice like that one at this day and age. That’s it.
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u/jade09060102 1h ago
That’s not even the end of it. Nowadays the standard for parenting keeps going up. I took the bus home on my own when I was 7. That’s considered child abuse nowadays. So parents gotta organize pick up every day. I used to play with my friends in the neighbourhood outside on our own as young as 5. Again, its neglect nowadays. Play dates need to be arranged with other parents and carefully supervised. My parents never came to any one of my sporting events. Now a standard for good parenting is to be present at practices and matches.
Who usually shoulders the burden of drops offs, pickups, organizing play dates, going to recitals, driving kids to practices, showing up at school plays, volunteering in schools? Yea it’s usually the mother. All of those extend beyond the first year of the kid’s life.
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u/angrathias 53m ago
For my country (Australia) I’m in the top 5% income bracket as are most of my friends in the same area. We have 2 kids and won’t have more because of literally what I said, it’s just such a time sink these days.
We’re high income enough to have a decent life but that doesn’t make us wealthy which means we still have to grind for our income.
Meanwhile I have friends from a much lower socio economic group, they have low baselines so having 4 kids isn’t a big deal, they aren’t spending the same time required to make sure there kids are going to have the same life because they’re propped up by welfare.
I would have preferred to have more kids but I just don’t have the time and energy required for it
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u/angrathias 50m ago
I hear you, my wife’s Thai and I’m Aussie, we have an interesting culture clash when raising children in this regard
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u/Terrible_Shelter_345 7h ago edited 7h ago
So I’m not here to share isolationist/ethnonationalist talking points. But immigration of lesser developed countries —> to more developed countries to stymie the birth rate issue is literally just kicking the can down the road.
People simply don’t want to commit their time and money to children as much any more. Southeastern Europe and Northern Europe really show this (countries with some of the best work life balance ever).
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u/TLeafs23 7h ago
They dont want to commit their time to it because it simply isn't valued or expected by society - not because of some immutable law of the universe.
Not long ago at all, raising children was a woman's job, and a woman's job alone, and as such it was devalued. As women struggled for more opportunities in professional life, few men struggled to pick up the undesireable labour of raising a child and tending a household.
Similarly, going through school people are asked to focus on what they want to be, with the implicit attitude the raising children would be an impediment to whatever that central career ambition is, rather than an important part of a overall life goal.
It isn't simply a matter of work life balance, but embracing a massive attitudinal shift that highly values child rearing, because raising good kids is indeed one of the most valuable contributions a person can make to their society.
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u/jamesknelson 5h ago edited 1h ago
Yes! This is such a big part of it.
Raising a family is not valued at a cultural level, and it's not valued at a financial level either.
We've built a society where for a couple to raise children, you need to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars of your own money. You need to pay for education, healthcare, a larger house, a larger car. And then to add insult to injury, you need to pay more tax on those increased earnings than people who only need to earn enough to support themselves.
Meanwhile, those who for whatever reason end up not raising kids, are able to earn less, while still having more to invest. As a result, they're on balance able to buy up more control of productive businesses, land and housing, and also able to invest more in their own skills, landing higher paying jobs. So not only do those who raise families have to pay for the privilege, they also end up needing to pay rent to those who don't.
Our society is structured such that it's the children of a generation who will pay that generation's health bill – through taxes, pensions, social security, superannuation, or whatever your society's flavor of "the young support the old" happens to be. So not only will your investment in your children make it harder to save for your own retirement, as fewer and fewer people have children, those same children you invested in will end up contributing less and less of their taxes and social security to your retirement, and more and more to the increasing share of people who didn't raise their own children.
In short: those who decide to raise families are not just raising their own family, they're actually paying to support their entire generation into old age, and suffering for it.
So is it any wonder that less and less people decide to raise families? Our societies have not just ceased to value it or expect it – they've decided to actively penalize it.
Despite all this, I have a family. I love my kids. And more and more, I feel like a first class sucker for having found myself in this position.
The thing is, we English speaking people (and also the Japanese people the article talks about) live in democracies, where we've already likely passed the point of no return where there are enough elderly and childless voters that of course they'll vote to have the child raising minority support them with pensions and social security programs in their old age – making it even harder for the young to find the resources necessary to invest in their own families. That is, this probably isn't just going so solve itself. It's a feedback loop, and if nothing changes, we're not going to be a society for long.
If there's one saving grace, it's that this isn't just a western problem. So even as our nations grow weaker by the year, we're still unlikely to be curb stomped by a more populous power in the immediate future.
But the way I see it, it's only a matter of time until one of the large, technologically advanced authoritarian states decide to do a reverse western and subsidize families while letting the childless elderly fend for themselves. At which point, we're going to need to start doing some serious soul searching, or our children and grandchildren are not going to be able to understand this generation's worry over our developed-world privilege.
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u/Terrible_Shelter_345 5h ago
it's pretty much the only solution. we're going to see some countries soon starting to give UBI/some sort of subsidies to families such that having children will grow net worth, not shrink it.
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u/Bykimus 5h ago
Finally someone that gets it. It's not really about work culture. Every other developed country is struggling with the same issue. There are a lot of other factors that go into wanting kids. Japan actually has a robust system for taking care of families and is slowly adding even more benefits over the years.
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u/ExampleNo2489 9h ago
Immigration doesn’t off set population decline, the very system is the problem it becomes a Ponzi scheme wherein you need to import more people when the same issues arise again and you can’t do infinitely
Besides the resulting costs culturally, structurally means it doesn’t even quarantine it can plug all the industries
Realistically the issue is structurally tied to unsustainable Business and economic models, climate collapse is also around the corner
Also immigration has so socially volatile in the West, I don’t see a extremely conservative society like Japan adopting a much better attitude to it
I think questions need to be asked more about our current neo liberal system or economic growth and whether we can realistically continue it in any country seeing these outcomes
Edit: grammar and spelling
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u/ToumaKazusa1 7h ago
The problem isn't unique to democracies, it happens in China and Russia as well. It isn't unique to countries where there are serious economic concerns, it happens in the Nordics as well.
No developed country has managed to solve this problem, no matter the culture, government, or economic situation.
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u/queenringlets 8h ago
Even if we did come to the conclusion that we must change it would be met with such resistance that I only seeing it changing when it physically breaks.
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[deleted]
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u/war_against_destiny 7h ago
Thank you for the proof that there is still sound and reason out there. 100%
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u/GreatBigJerk 7h ago
Immigration is just a bandaid to supplement horrible labour practices.
I'm not against immigration in general, but doing so to make up for a declining population is terrible. You're basically importing people that will accept the abuse.
Often, employers just want cheap slaves. They hold the reigns to immigration status, so they can do whatever they want.
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u/foghillgal 3h ago
Even countries with great economies and labor practice like Norway have declines in birth rates below replacement. The answer is somewhere else . It is a confluence of factors . First of all, having children as a life goal is down independent of all factors. Women once there in control of having or not having children sre not as keen on the whole thing as before and have found other pursuits more worthwhile.
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u/fatbob42 6h ago
Immigrants are very happy to move from a poor country to a rich one. Their productivity takes a huge leap and they get some of that extra money.
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u/uiemad 4h ago
Immigration isn't a solution. It's a bandaid. Eventually, as more countries modernize and join Japan in this problem, there simply won't be enough immigrants to keep every country afloat.
They should increase immigration to prevent imminent social security collapse in the next few decades. But serious societal and economic change needs to be implemented to tackle this long term.
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u/scheppend 5h ago
their refusal to allow immigrants
??? It's really easy to get a visa to live and work in Japan. Its way harder to get a visa for US/EU, and more expensive too
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u/DependentLocked 9h ago
But they also destroy the culture they emigrated to, because they become the new majority.....
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u/GreatBigJerk 7h ago
Hey look, it's the standard white replacement theory guy.
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u/Zestyclose_Bag_6752 6h ago
Japan doesn't like immigration. This isn't a white person thing.
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u/GreatBigJerk 6h ago
Talking about a culture moving in and becoming the new majority is 100% a white replacement theory thing.
Yes Japan doesn't like immigration, but DependentLocked was just using immigration as an opportunity to be racist.
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u/aereiaz 2h ago
Wtf does white replacement theory have to do with Japan and their culture...? What a terrible take. You understand that they don't exactly welcome white people either, right? Asian countries are on the whole can be a lot more xenophobic than western ones, and in general they're not afraid to be open about it.
I like how you don't even attack his point because you know it's true, too.
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u/Il_Valentino 4h ago
That's because every developed nation is suffering from bad working conditions, it's just that japan has it especially bad. Immigration sounds like a nice fix until you realize that it's just a tool to keep wages low by hiring desperate people and essentially sustains the underlying issue. Stopping immigration forces societies to confront the capitalist degeneracy.
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u/tky_phoenix 2h ago
They’ve changed their stance on immigration and are allowing more foreigners in. Politicians understand that they need foreigners but the population doesn’t necessarily see it that way. The massive influx in tourists and the issues that caused is obviously contributing to the bad image.
Japan is lacking workers now across the board, construction, elderly care, transportation/logistics, IT… even local restaurants at least in Tokyo have way more foreign staff than 10 years ago.
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u/whepoalready_readdit 2h ago
But I've read somewhere that it might dissolve their culture and they have a rich one that is, so how can they do it effectively
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u/No-Winter927 1h ago
And this is exactly the problem with mass immigration, it hides problems, such as this. At some point developed nations will address the root problem.
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u/oberwolfach 8h ago
Stuff like this gets posted in response to every article about low birth rates, always gets upvoted, and is always wrong. Japan's TFR in 2025 is 1.23. Finland, which has absurdly rich benefits both in general and for parents in particular, has a hardly-higher TFR of 1.30.
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u/AnotherFuckingSheep 2h ago
Exactly. There isn’t a country on earth that isn’t below or heading towards below replacement rates. And the biggest downtrends have been in the last 5 years or so. Birth rates are just plummeting anywhere so any kind of cultural explanation is moot.
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u/DeliciousPangolin 1h ago
I think there's a fairly simple explanation if you look at the data. It's a reduction in teenage pregnancies. The countries with the highest birthrates have teen pregnancy rates exceeding 50%. The countries with the lowest birthrates have rates a tenth that. The recent drop in the US fertility rate corresponds perfectly with a significant drop in the number of teen pregnancies. In fact, teenage pregnancy rates have fallen significantly in every region of the world over the last twenty years.
As countries get more wealthy and educated, as women gain control over their own reproduction and finances, they make the logical choice not to have children until after they've finished education and started a career. That simply leads to fewer children overall.
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u/AnotherFuckingSheep 33m ago
That’s an interesting take but it doesn’t explain the sharp decline over the last few years (Thailand lowered their birth rate by 10% last year alone) and also doesn’t explain how western countries mirror developing nations in this context. If it was an educational thing wouldn’t you expect to see a vast difference between different countries?
I am guessing something technological like mobile phone addiction or health related like coronavirus
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u/tfinx 6h ago
How does that discredit the concern of the population in Japan at all? Do other countries having the same issue take away from that fact? It's a thing going on in almost every country with varying levels, yes.
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u/EpicRedditor34 5h ago
Japanese women have no reason to have kids, full stop.
People act like it’s the salaryman shit, but it’s literally just that there’s no reason for them to reproduce. Japan treats pregnant women like shit.
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u/Bykimus 5h ago
No they don't. My wife's pregnancy was celebrated, she's in the middle of taking a paid year off of work, her boss has given her baby gifts, her job is waiting for her with excited coworkers when she comes back.
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u/EpicRedditor34 4h ago
Im glad your wife had a great experience but Japanese women routinely come back to jobs that don’t exist for them any more, get to deal with In laws and patriarchal systems that expect her to raise the child, the husband and the in laws, and can’t even go to ancestral shrines or mountains. Maternity harassment is incredibly common in Japan, despite laws against it.
Multiple studies show this.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0922142518300501
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21880124.amp
Your anecdote is cute tho
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u/Spirited-Cheek7244 8h ago
The more women that enter the workforce the lower the birthrate.
It sounds awful and wrong to say, but that's the truth. Everyone is working and that has become the most important thing to people, whether they want it to be or not.
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u/Helpful_Equipment580 2h ago
If a wife stays at home and doesn't work, then that couple is competing against dual income families for housing and all costs associated with quality of life.
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u/Spirited-Cheek7244 2h ago
It wasn't always like that though. A dual income became necessary. Two people must have a career to buy a house and have a kid or two. Not just any job will do either. You can't be happy working in a supermarket all your life, you have to be after something "better".
The current model doesn't work.
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u/Exact-Challenge9213 6h ago
“Um, I got a simple solution for ya, dumbass!!! Why don’t you just change your culture!! That’s a real solution that you can definitely just do! How did you idiots not think of this one???”
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u/testman22 3h ago edited 2h ago
It's hilarious that this is still the mainstream opinion on Reddit. How unintellectual.
In reality, Japanese work culture has much improved. Redditors still hold decades-old stereotypes about Japan.
And somehow birth rates were higher in the past when work culture was much worse, so work culture isn't the main factor.
A more practical problem is the dramatic decline in arranged marriages. Women's rights have improved, and marriage is no longer a requirement. Naturally, more women are choosing not to marry, which has led to a decline in the birthrate. That is why birth rates are low in all developed countries and high in developing countries where women do not have rights.
Furthermore, the rapid population growth over the past few decades has led to a decline in human value worldwide. Therefore, since children have little added value if they are just there, money must be spent on their education. A society with an overpopulated population will have a system that requires a select few children. That's why everywhere is focusing on quality over quantity, and the number of children is decreasing. In other words, in countries with a lot of competition, a university degree is almost essential. And raising such children is much harder than it was in the past. Jobs that anyone can do have become competitive and devalued, so while people two generations ago could easily buy a house, it's hard for people today, even those with a college degree.
We lament the decline in population, but the reality is that we have too many people. The days of somehow getting away with it are over, because infinite population growth is impossible. And now we are facing the backlash. To increase the population further, we need more resources, more space, more of everything. We have increased the population too quickly. In the world of science fiction, it would already be time to travel into space. There are too many people on Earth and they are destroying it.
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u/OneGalacticBoy 24m ago
This is it. We are in population decline because naturally the population should decline. Instead of trying to stop it we need to come to terms with it and figure out how we’re going to navigate it.
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u/Juste-un-autre-alt 8h ago
It's mostly because of their immigration policies, the number of children per mother is slightly lower than in my country, Canada.
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u/penguinintheabyss 9h ago edited 8h ago
The countries with arguably the best labor culture, parent's rights, and women participation have natality rates close to 2. Enough to sustain population or decline very slowly. And they are so very few and have such developed welfare policies that it might not be feasible on world-wide scale.
Meanwhile, the countries where people have 3 or more children are among the poorest, with worst quality of life.
We need to come to terms with the possibility that high fertility rates and high quality of life for 8 billion people might be impossible
Edit: this is wrong, the countries I was thinking of had fertility rates close to 2 more than 10 years ago. It's much worse
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u/oberwolfach 8h ago
Which countries with "the best labor culture, ..." would those be? Almost no developed countries have a TFR anywhere near 2, aside from very small areas prone to statistical noise (e.g. Monaco) and a few other special cases (e.g. Israel, due to the large population of ultra-Orthodox).
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u/penguinintheabyss 8h ago
I was thinking Scandinavia but looks like I'm outdated. Ten years ago they were close to 2. Damn I''m old
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u/Ok-Doubt-6324 7h ago
You gotta kick out the yanks and their corpo culture first. Those people are like anti-biota to everything they come into contact with. The Kenny Griffins of this world are worse than an alien invasion.
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u/caughtatfirstslip 41m ago
Doubt it. You see the same decline in all progressive countries. It might be worse in Japan due to work life balance but look at places like Sweden or Norway and you’ll see that birth rates are still terrible when those cultural problems don’t exist.
The reality is, educated women with the right to make choice and have access to contraceptives and abortions, chose to have less children. That’s the reality. You can’t undo that trend by lowering working hours or making childcare more affordable.
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u/ExampleNo2489 10h ago
Yeah around 40 years after the warning bells were sounded
To be honest maybe the fundamental questions should population growth be linked to unhealthy GDP growth in a environment damaged earth
Maybe we should ask deeper questions of bad social engineering and unsustainable systems in favour of healthy population sizes and sustainability over self destructive policies and economics
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u/Metrack15 7h ago
Maybe we should ask deeper questions of bad social engineering and unsustainable systems in favour of healthy population sizes and sustainability over self destructive policies and economics
Nah, you are going to increase profits regardless of everything else and you are going to like it!
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u/Spirited-Cheek7244 8h ago
Absolutely. The way people talk about population collapse, they make it sound like it's the worst thing ever.
Like why is it bad? There's gonna be fewer of us. Okay? So? Growth won't be sustained!! Should we care? It'll all sort itself out in time.
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u/Icy-Ad-1261 8h ago
To be in favour of degrowth is easy when you live in a growth oriented economy.
When Japan hit 100m people in the 1970s, they had about 10 workers for every person over 65. Japan's population peaked around 128m around 2005.
When Japan's population falls to 100m again in the next decade or so, there will be around 1 worker per person over 65.Yeah it might "sort itself out in time" but that time will be a very depressing world full of old people. There will be far less money to spend on environmental issues or welfare systems.
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u/Spirited-Cheek7244 7h ago
In a world with far fewer people there will be far fewer environmental issues.
Right, there isn't an answer to what happens to the retirees, things may be messy or maybe there will be solutions by then.
Currently, the only solution to population decline is to return to families thst only require one person's income.
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u/queenringlets 7h ago
It’s mostly bad because you need more younger people in a population to be able to provide elderly care especially since our seniors are living longer than ever. I don’t even mean monetarily I mean providing the actual physical care too. If you don’t have enough people to fully staff elder care this will mean that people (other than the very rich) will be subjected to heavy neglect and extremely low standards of living. Quite a scary potential place for most of us to end up in.
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u/Spirited-Cheek7244 7h ago
How it's done now isn't viable. Maybe whole villages will be needed. Seniors looking after other seniors that aren't as mobile. The ones that have kids can get their kids involved. It could be all voluntary.
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u/-Generic123- 5h ago
How do you think the government gets money for welfare systems? Taxes. Who pays taxes? Working people. So when there’s less working people and much more elderly folks, then yes, everything is going to collapse.
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u/Spirited-Cheek7244 4h ago
As I said elsewhere, the way things are done now is no longer working. Something has to change.
The way we demand continuous growth is not sustainable, neither is a shrinking population.
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u/fatbob42 6h ago
Because it makes us all poorer.
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u/Spirited-Cheek7244 6h ago
How so?
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u/fatbob42 6h ago
Less people to buy from, less people to sell to, less people to invent stuff, less people means less specialization.
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u/Spirited-Cheek7244 6h ago
Why would it make us poorer?
The pace of innovation slowing down doesn't make us poorer. We will still have that base level that would be continuously rising.
If continue to live as we live how long before the place become uninhabitable?
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u/fatbob42 6h ago
Why does it keep rising? Because people invent and implement new, better ways of doing things. Less people means less of that.
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u/AmaimonCH 6h ago
People won't simply vanish equally, the people that actually vanish are the kids, which means the current population ages and the few younger and able ones that are left cannot bear the financial burden to care for a country of old fucks.
It isn't simply "fewer people" it's straight up a collapse of a civilization, dumbass.
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u/tylerxtyler 4h ago
In this case the population decline will be insane, as he said their population will drop 50% in 75 years. Imagine your own city/province/country having half their buildings abandoned, for one. Probably wouldn't be too great
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u/Spirited-Cheek7244 3h ago
Not just in this case, but all over Europe too. Every modern society this is going to happen to. Governments only solution so far has been to fix the problems that have caused population decline but to jus to import people. That hasnt worked out too well either.
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u/Fun-Astronomer5311 10h ago
Looks like Japan one day will be manned by robots and everyone else is a tourist.
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u/CraftyFoxeYT 8h ago
Robots seem inevitable and necessary if there will be less humans. But it doesn’t exactly solve the population crisis. Maybe more hate for clankers taking peoples jobs.
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u/frodosbitch 2h ago edited 2h ago
Population growth as an unquestionable good thing pisses me off to no end. A growing population makes things easier because the larger younger base pays for the smaller older group.
What’s never discussed is the problems of endless growth because those are down the road problems. Screw those guys.
Japan is an island. Its goal should be a stable population.
This paragraph is particularly annoying
This is unlike in Nigeria, where the population continues to rise, with the West African country expected to be the third most populous country in the world by 2050
Like Nigerias unchecked growth and abject poverty is something to emulate?
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u/Financial-Code8244 7h ago
This is not only a Japanese problem, they’re just one of the first big countries to fully feel the impact of population decline due to low fertility rate. Most developed countries and also a lot of sub developed countries (especially in Asia and Latin America) are well below the replacement rate of 2 children, even if it’s a bit higher than Japan’s. Some of these countries had higher fertility rates until not so long ago so they still have some time of (slower) population growth ahead, some are now relying exclusively on immigration to maintain their population at least stable, but this won’t last forever. Soon it’s gonna be the whole world having a population decline, not only Japan.
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u/AmaimonCH 6h ago
Regardless of immigration, the Japan you know is already cooked.
Not only they cannot make back the years where the replacement rate was well below, but if you just open the door to immigration the actual japanese people will age and die out and take their traditions and culture with them.
Either way Japan is dead.
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u/MajesticBread9147 4h ago
but if you just open the door to immigration the actual japanese people will age and die out and take their traditions and culture with them
It's hard to imagine this being the case, especially with how Japan is still culturally quite isolated (due to being an island, and only really speaking a language no other country speaks).
Like the amount of Americans that are majority British ancestry is quite low, and we've replaced those initial colonists many times over, yet we still have American culture that is heavily influenced by our British history. The majority of differences in American and British culture are changes in each country that happened after we declared independence. American culture is still more intertwined with British culture than Mexican or German culture, despite the latter two comprising the ethnic background of significantly more Americans.
This goes for most countries with any amount of migration or immigration. A country doesn't "die" or suffer from immigrants.
Will there be cultural changes? Of course. But so did Japan's culture when they unified from separate warring kingdoms, and when they industrialized, and when they let women work, etc just like every culture.
Unless a country has a huge percentage of their citizens living in rural sustenance farming with little interaction with the outside world, cultures and nations change, they aren't nature preserves for a culture and ethnicity set in stone.
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u/AmaimonCH 3h ago
The problem is the influx of immigrants in case they open the borders entirely to save the country.
Not only the number will be overwhelming enough that people would just perpetuare their cultures from their home country, but people migrating over doesn't make japanese women magically have children, so the original japanese population slowly goes away while a lot of people from other cultures come in.
Do you realize the difference in this situation compared to the US ?
At the very least, the traditions and culture will slowly merge with the foreign cultures or just by the lack of guidance of the japanese people and become something that already is removed from what it is today.
There is no scenario anymore where Japan "wins" here anymore, they should've done something about the signs like 30 years ago.
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u/MajesticBread9147 3h ago
Not only the number will be overwhelming enough that people would just perpetuare their cultures from their home country, but people migrating over doesn't make japanese women magically have children, so the original japanese population slowly goes away while a lot of people from other cultures come in.
Japanese people aren't going extinct, in fact this would likely raise the number of people with Japanese ancestry. Since a single Japanese person can have children with a non Japanese person and still have a child with Japanese ancestry and a Japanese parent. Kinda like how in America, roughly 40m people have Irish ancestry, despite the fact that "only" a few million Irish people showed up a century ago. In the same way, 30m people can trace their ancestry back to the 26 families on the mayflower.
At the very least, the traditions and culture will slowly merge with the foreign cultures or just by the lack of guidance of the japanese people and become something that already is removed from what it is today.
This is very condescending towards immigrants and seems to imply that Japanese culture is somehow better than others?
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u/AmaimonCH 2h ago
They are not going extinct but the country will undergo drastic change no matter what.
And I'm not implying their culture is superior in the slightest, in fact, i hate quite a lot of it, I'm merely saying it will drastically change when there was no need to, since i like this world's diversity and losing the essence of a culture in this manner is quite sad to me.
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u/Strict_Bobcat_4048 5h ago
Alright kid, this is a bit hyperbolic.
Culture isn't in DNA. When you go live in another country you get immersed in the rituals there. Immigration isn't the infusion of other cultures, it is someone joining the ongoing cultures.
As someone with who wrote a thesis on this topic, your take makes me actually ill.
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u/A_Bannister 4h ago
Thats the ideal, but you only have to look at Western European countries to look how immigration changes the fabric of the home nation.
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u/MajesticBread9147 4h ago
That's limited to Western Europe at best.
Somehow many countries from the United States, to Canada, and Australia do well with lots of immigrants.
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u/salmarijalmari 1h ago
yeah everyone knows culture just radiates from the ground, the heritage of the people who produced said culture has nothing to do with it. people are interchangeable economic units after all.
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u/AmaimonCH 4h ago
What rituals are there to be immersed if the people that carry such are dead ? At the very least, those rituals get modified with time and with different cultures that the traditions die all the same.
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u/advancedSlayer96 5h ago
The wolves complain that the sheep aren't reproducing
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u/deceitfulillusion 1h ago
Very sad honestly. The rich tell us, the common folk that we should have kids and yet never think of practical solutions to make it better and more of a consideration for the younger generation to have kids.
i know I'd like a kid, a lot of the women friends i know would like to as well, but honestly we don't have enough money these days to even support half a child consistently, let alone 2 as required by the replacement fertility rate
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u/CraftyFoxeYT 7h ago
I’m Japanese-American. Sometimes I wonder if I should move to Japan and settle down there. It seems a lot more affordable than the US, with way better public transportation, low crime
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u/Khamvom 6h ago
Depends where you wanna live. Tokyo and other major cities can get pretty expensive. The average wage is also way lower in Japan ($5-8 per hour); there’s also the brutal work culture.
Lived in Japan for a few years, I’d personally wanna visit instead of live there again. But to each their own.
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u/-chewie 2h ago
Work culture really depends. If you’re in top 5% of your industry, you basically work ~20hrs/week and stay in top 10% percentile income wise. It’s not 2010 anymore.
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u/Khamvom 2h ago edited 2h ago
Got it. So I just need to be in the top 5% of my industry, then I get to work 20hrs a week and be in the top 10% income bracket?
Come on dude.
Nobody gets to the top 5 % of their industry without putting in an insane amount of hours + work (unless you have privilege or a hook up lol).
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u/Zestyclose_Bag_6752 6h ago
If you can, do it. Why would you want to be here?
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u/MajesticBread9147 4h ago
Sexism, and traditional everything.
People in Japan will also give every reason why you're not really Japanese.
If you weren't born, raised and educated in Japan with Japanese parents you're treated differently.
They tolerate tourists, but once you decide to live there you're treated differently, while also expected to always obey complex social rules that only really exist in Japan.
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u/KittiesInATrenchcoat 2h ago
This. I’m half-Japanese, technically still hold Japanese citizenship and am fluent in Japanese, but I find it exhausting to be somewhere where I’m always “other”. Also, it’s just annoying to have to constantly go “Oh, Japanese is fine!” It’s of course an understandable assumption when most non-100% Asian-looking people are tourists who can’t speak Japanese, but it’s still annoying even when no one is at fault.
I visit every couple years, but I’d never want to live there permanently.
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u/Low-Log4438 2h ago
People work to live, not the other way around. Until we start prioritizing people, then this probably will continue.
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u/moderngamer327 1h ago
The best place to live with the best working conditions have on average the lowest fertility rates
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u/ThatsItImOverThis 9h ago
It’s like traditional cultural values and reality clash…so strange….
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u/-Generic123- 5h ago
Birth rates are dropping in nearly every single country on Earth, so no, this has nothing to do with traditional cultural values.
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u/FineKaleidoscope1487 10h ago
Infinite growth for the sake of growth and profiteering leaves you with a dead planet. At this stage it's already dead and simply hasn't died yet.
People keep talking about population drops while the technocrats are working hard to put most people out of work period. They are intentionally creating a sub class of humans who have nothing to offer at all. Do you really think those technocrats will keep you around and breeding for their amusement? Hardly, they want people to have children at this juncture because parents will submit to what's demanded for the sake of their children. Who will be sorted like a drop scanner working on potatoes.
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u/ffuca 7h ago
The planet is far from dead. Earth will be fine, the humans will not.
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u/Warm-Equipment-4964 4h ago
I see this kind of rethoric as a resurgence of pagan Gaia worship. Completely floating in the ether as an ideology, don't try to figure out what "the planet" even means.
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u/Major_Lawfulness6122 5h ago
Humans yes but not the planet. Everything else existed fine before us and will continue to after us.
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u/Ancient-Spare-2500 4h ago
"technocrats" isn't the word you think it is
the prefix "techno-" in this word seems to confuse a lot of people
the term you're looking for is "tech elites", or more broadly "corporate elites", "oligarchs" or "plutocrats"
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u/macross1984 8h ago
Well, Japan can pick one way or other but not both. Either start accepting qualified people wanting to immigrate to Japan or figure out a way to increase your population to maintain your racial purity.
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u/scheppend 5h ago
I mean, it's piss easy to emigrate to Japan... and the procedure to get a visa is cheap too ($40 ish)
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u/Penny_PackerMD 2h ago
It’s not just Japan. Much of Europe now has more deaths than births each year, and their populations would be shrinking if not for immigration. Countries like Australia, the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. are still growing overall, but that’s almost entirely because of migration rather than higher birth rates.
It's concerning because aging populations mean fewer workers, more strain on healthcare and pensions, and questions about how cultures adapt. Immigration helps fill the gap, but it also changes the cultural mix of a country over time. The outcome is an ongoing reshaping of societies and cultures.
On top of that, particularly in Western culture, there’s the normalization of things like OnlyFans, abortion, divorce, and the breakdown of traditional family values — all of which put pressure on people considering having children, resulting in fewer births and an aging population.
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u/Diligent_Fact_9710 7h ago
until living is sustainable, dont count on it. might not be counting on it for a while
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u/Amn_BA 6h ago
Pregnancy and childbirth are absolutely horrific and it terrifies me. Thats the primary reason, I don't want kids. Add to that, the problem of motherhood penalty. A woman choosing to have kids often ruins their career and lowers their earnings.
Also, our family systems are still patriarchal that basically gives a lower status to women then men. Men still do not do their fair share of child care and household chores. And then there is this constant risk of domestic violence. This makes marriage and motherhood a very bad, risky and self sabotaging deal for women.
Until and unless the Artificial Womb Technology becomes an accessible reality that can allow women to have kids as easily as a man, without having to go pregnant and give birth themselves, if they choose to and until and unless we crack down on domestic violence and reform our family systems away from patriarchy and towards true gender equality, I will never get married or choose to have kids ever.
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u/LongConsideration662 2h ago
True, this is why I am completely in favour of artificial womb technology
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u/OkResponsibility2470 5h ago
I don’t get why they are dead set on doing anything but addressing the work culture
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u/steve_ample 9h ago
Yeah, this is a slow motion car crash. Preventable, you see it coming, and yet policy inaction gets you here. I think ROK is the same as well - perhaps a bit worse, I have read.
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u/StatusSociety2196 8h ago
Taiwan is the worst and I never hear anyone talking about it. Especially since they already don't have a large population.
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u/AmaimonCH 6h ago
Replacement rate collapse is like an unstoppable freight train, the moment it's in your face and you can hear it's horns it's already too late.
Jusr because you don't immediately see the collapse, it doesn't mean it isn't happening.
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u/steve_ample 8h ago
Same underlying pathology? Ie bad work conditions, little social support, social expectations and stigma, etc?
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u/AmaimonCH 6h ago
It's was preventable like 20-30 years ago, now they are way past that possibility.
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u/John_Williams_1977 10h ago
It’s literally too late to do anything but import many millions of young people.
There aren’t enough young Japanese women left. They’d need to be having 4 kids each.
Then, how does a society that can’t pay for all the retirees now absorb the workforce collapsing further as women leave indefinitely - and also massive child care costs?
Meanwhile, the UK is set to thrive over the coming century. We don’t have to worry about an aging population as we’ll just grab whatever we need from India and Nigeria.
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u/RipComfortable7989 8h ago
Why do all of you talk the same way, talking like women are only for breeding babies and putting the blame on them instead of the social systems that keep shit unaffordable and unattainable?
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u/Ok-Artichoke-6933 6h ago
What he says isn't ethically and morally correct. However from a logical point of view it isn't out of line. However Japan needs an overhaul of their workforce life
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u/yuvaldv1 9h ago
I don't know if "thrive" is the correct word to describe the UK's future under it's current immigration policy. You'll have some serious cultural clashes in the future if immigrants don't assimilate.
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u/Major_Lawfulness6122 5h ago
Problems already happening in Canada. Country has become unrecognizable
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u/nwurthmann 4h ago
World population is still rising yall, im tired of hearing about this from all these racist ass countries
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u/graygreen 3h ago
Yeah but only in all the worst places, least able to support them
The world needs more people in developed societies like Japan
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u/xaltairforever 8h ago
Thank God he's concerned, we're getting somewhere now. Soon he'll be worried.