Japan’s demographic crisis is deepening faster than expected, with the number of births this year on track to fall below even the government’s most pessimistic projections.
Archived version: https://archive.is/20251228215131/https://slguardian.org/japans-birth-rate-set-to-break-even-the-bleakest-forecasts/
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
You can’t complain about a birthrate crisis when the world is full of immigrants and there is a domestic cost of living crisis unless you are a eugenicist on some level.
Throwing rocks from the glass house that is the US I know
I remember living it in Mexico like a free soul as a kid. We had poor people but I think I never really saw homeless people. Even the poorest person I knew had a little house where he lived with a few donkeys. We called him Toño La Muerte because his eyes were deep into his very thin looking skull eye sockets. He also lived right outside of the city pantheon. His little house burnt down once and besides the time my father died I can’t remember having such a sinking feeling. Anyway his house was promptly rebuilt With community help. We didn’t just let Toñito die out in despair having nothing. Anyway, now things are bleak for all kids out there. How can they ever dream of owning a place to live? And so if you can only focus on that problem, there’s no room for the having kids problem. Its simple, you got no place to live so bring no kids until you do. Okay so let’s say 50 year old men can finally afford a house so they start courting 20 year old women. That’s a big gap. Maybe their sperm is not great. But then it also means that they are easily outcompeting young men for women who can have kids. Ofcourse for women this all means that they can’t have a future of their own. They live so they can make bsbies with 50 year old men shooting blanks. Some of this might be true. My wife and I are similar age and married close to our 40’s. We knew we had to make some babies asap or we would miss that chance. 5 years and you’re done. Once women hit 40, its very hard to be pregnant. Having kids within 5 years is a lot of pressure.
Japan is super racist despite the polite facade. It also doesn’t help that they have a “work and drink yourself to death at the expense of having a life” culture.
America certainly does similar things, but we don’t bother polishing the turd with politeness.
i think the niceness is for tourist sake, and not for everything else.
Anyone obsessed with birthrates is an asshole until proven otherwise.
We went straight from ‘there’s too many people!’ to ‘there’s not enough people!’ on a dime. Even rates drastically below replacement aren’t Children Of Men. There’s just fewer kids and more old farts. So… Florida?
Oh god, maybe we should be worried.
Florida! Clothing optional restaurants! Yey!
But everyone is 75.
You clearly don’t understand the situation. 125 million down to … 60 million, less, in half a century, maybe less… How to manage that is a serious question. Infrastructure is a huge question.
japan like china, and korea are pretty hostile to immigration policies. at least for china its pretty hard, plus you have to denounce your citizenships before living there permanently. might be different for RICH people though.
Less power, less traffic, less consumption… what part of infrastructure isn’t suddenly overengineered? For a value of “suddenly” that means in fifty years.
And as others note, this isn’t because the Japanese are suddenly averse to fucking. They’re overworked to the point of self-parody. This trend is eminently reversible, if the people addicted to the wiggly line can look further into the future than next quarter.
i think south korea has a worst rate than japan, they are declining faster.
All the MBAs and politicians throwing their hands up about birth rates because the real answer is the unthinkable “number might go down”
Let me make it simple.
You can’t raise a fucking family if all you’re doing is barely surviving.
Geriatocracy is a good word. Putting it in my active vocaulary.
The word is “gerentocracy”
I wish I could spell 🙈
Amazing how the people in positions to have kids are screaming at the top of their lungs what would help the situation and the geritocracy just ignores them and has the fucking nerve to whine about low birth rates.
Wipe your own asses boomers, we’re done propping up this dead society
If Japan capped working at 28 hours a week and anything after that required double the pay (for overtime), this problem would taken care of.
Working all the time makes people miserable. It’s an externality that impacts society in all sorts of horrible ways. It would be proper for the government to institute a rule like this.
It would definitely lower GDP of Japan and cause some economic issues, but the alternative (living in a world where people are so miserable that they don’t fall in love as much and want to reproduce) is worse for their economy.
Will they do this? No, because it would require thinking outside of the box too much and would be seen as too extreme.
Will they do this? No, because it would require thinking outside of the box too much and would be seen as too extreme.
That still won’t work. There is no develooed country on the planet eg Sweden, Australia etc thay does not have a less then replacement birthrate. When given agency outside of a patarchial and/or religious society, most women will choose 0,1 or 2 kids, all below replacement.
For every women choosing 0 you need another choosing 5 just to tread water. That Japans and Koreas are less again may be work related but it would still be less then replacement, no matter yours, or any other suggestion.
None of this is a probelm, it’s just differnt.
Growing the population is just kicking the can down the road because you can’t grow it forever anyway… We already have a over strained biosphere; pollution, resource depletion, climate change, accelerated species extinction etc
This entire thing is a nothing burger.
Yup. It is so weird to me how little the destroyed work-life-balance is mentioned whenever declining birth rates are discussed (not only in Japan).
They don’t even have to pay overtime for work over 28 hours. If they just paid overtime for the actual or time work that is done, that would make an enormous difference. When I worked in Japan (25 years ago, but I have read/heard nothing to suggest that the situation has changed), it was normal for people to work 60 or 70 hours, but not claim any overtime.
also one of the other problems is mysogyny, women are expected to give up thier careers when they get pregnant, and recieved very little maternity care.
Here in the USA, employers just avoid overtime and benefits by hiring two people to work 35 hours/week, who each have two jobs.
Or make them salaried employees
Dropping dead on the factory floor only to be replaced hours later isn’t very motivating I’d imagine
japan has a socially forced drinking after work hours problem,.
Article claims they expected these numbers but in 16 years. Numerically, its not that far off from the expected number of 750k births. Its 90%. I dont think thats too much of a difference to be alarmed about until you read into it more. Taxes will increase and pensions will be effected if this continues. To make matters worse this is after they already dumped billions into policies like extra free money (63$ per month🤣) until child is in high school proving that current efforts are not enough. Shame they cant address the root cause:
real reason is that they were victims of the ‘ice age generation (job shortage generation)’ and the stagnation of economies that followed, which prevented them from marrying or having children if they wanted to,” she said quoting research data.
Shame they cant address the root cause:
Thw root cause is giving women agency. Careers education etc and mostly free of religious indoctrination (eg Quiverful etc)
If women have a choice, the majority choose 0,1 or 2. For every woman that chooses 0, you need another woman choosing 5 just to tread water. Hungary and Poland are throwing a fortnue at it and gerting no where, as is Russia. Australia, Sweden etc all have less then replacement, the only reason Australia keeps growing it’s population is immigration. You either do that, or you take away womens right to choose, or your population goes backwards. (Or aim for some sort of stasis where deaths = births + immigration)
You can’t grow the population forever, so you have to address the issuie at some stage anyway.
This is the average amount of monthly hours (male/female)worked since 2013, i do not see an honest effort to help the population growth.
Source: https://www.e-stat.go.jp/en/
Which line’s male and which line’s female?
The blue line is male and the blue line is female.
The lower averaging one is the female one, but one must remember that japan is deeply conservative and that means household and caring for kids/elders are womens duties - additional to the working hours. I couldn’t find data for the amount of unpaid work done, but i found participation surveys, which show the difference in what percentage of men/women are involved in unpaid work on any given day in the working populace (data from 2021):
source: https://www.e-stat.go.jp/en/stat-search/files?stat_infid=000032224111
40 hours a week is 160 hours in a month, which the male average seems to dip below regularly and the female average is always below. That doesn’t seem worse than my situation in the US.
- This is the official working time, which does not include the obligatory overtime where bosses require their employees to accompany them going drinking and stuff
- They want japanese babies, and no immigrants - so their working time MUST get below other western countries (which keep their population at a stable level by immigration) or it will never happen.
Edit: 3) I forgot to mention that stuff like household chores, shopping and caring for the eldery is a womens domain, with embarrassingly low engagement by men. Everyone knows how much work that is - i postulate that the women work on average MORE than the men.
I completely agree. This is all about people not enjoying life because they work too much. Regulate the problem as an externality and this problem would go away. But government leaders in Japan would never have the guts to radically regulate the problem, such as requiring double the pay for overtime after 28 hours of work per person in a week (and this would need to be per person, not per job, to avoid people then just doubling up on jobs to get more hours; the externality could only be brought under control by having it apply to everyone with no way to circumvent it).
Didn’t they have a program a few years ago inviting foreigners to come and have (effectively) anchor babies?
That doesn’t seem right. Japan is very conservative of its “genealogy” and would treat “halfus” very differently than people who look Japanese regardless of mastery of the language. They also have strict immigration laws because, they don’t view immigration as a positive. It would be a threat to their homogeneous culture and society.
they do love westerners though, at least the well off ones.
Yeah, I was looking around and I couldn’t find anything about an actual program which makes me think it may have been just a comment someone made suggesting something like that. I do remember thinking at the time that Japan is rather unwelcoming to immigration by non-Japanese people so there would have to be a major shift in culture to allow that kind of thing.
Where my phone placed the new line was truly a rollercoaster:
Japan’s Birth Rate Set to Break Even
Wow, breaking even? Finally looking up for japan!
… the Bleakest Forecasts
Oh no.
korea is actually worst off than japan.
Italy’s not doing great either but it never comes up in the “look at japan” discussions
Probably because, compared to those 2 countries, Italy is easier to immigrate to.
Japan’s easier than most people think. As long as you have a college degree you can get a shit job pretty easily.
Is that right? Maybe if you look a certain way that’s socially acceptable to them. If you aren’t (white, Asian) you’ll get temporary work that pays like shit, and companies can not hire you because they don’t like that you’re not Japanese with no legal or social protections to aide you. Even shit jobs have social requirements. That’s really the biggest problem.
These days even the white folk are stuck in shit jobs because everyone and their mom wants to live in Japan. You need more than just a bachelor’s in whatever to make it long term.
Granted it’s probably still more difficult for non white or Asian people, but I wasn’t really taliking about long term prospects. Even still, it’s way easier to immigrate if you get married than somewhere like the US.
The birth rate discussion is mostly centered around “can we continue making money?”
Japan and Korea have low immigration rates, so the population falls and capital is unhappy about the prospect of a shrinking and more elderly workforce and domestic market to sell things to. Italy on the other hand has subsaharan and arabic immigration (and the actually larger eastern European and Chinese immigration - but they’re not as fantasy inducing for the far-right), so the population decline isn’t as fast. There are more workers to replace the dying ones, and capital is happy. Plus, you can use this fact to fuel chud paranoia about “the great replacement”
Immigrants are seen as a tool everywhere. Right wingers want us, only as long as we become loyal servants with 0 political power and living in fear of the state and society’s iron fist. Liberals want us, because “who will clean the toilets?”.
And the fact that something is happening to cause people to consider reproducing as outright harmful to their well-being among people who would otherwise have wanted offspring is a crisis of bourgeois society that few people actually want to talk about.
Wow, we’re lucky this whole AI thing will fix everything if we just give some tech bros a few more trillion dollars
Surely more austerity and social alienation will solve it
