An estimated 687,080 Japanese children were or will be born in 2024, falling below 700,000 for the first time and marking the lowest level on record, according to Asahi Shimbun calculations.
For comparison, Japan births in the past:
- 1935: 2.19 Million
- 1955: 1.73 Million
- 1985: 1.43 Million
- 2005: 1.06 Million
No they aren’t. According to current projections the population could drop from 130 million to 50 million by the end of the century. That’s a shocking gap. Nobody knows what the consequences of that would be.
And it is tragic when small towns and villages slowly die out. If you’ve ever lived in one or if any of your relatives who ever lived in one that suffered from young people leaving and never coming back, it’s just sad. To some degree it may be unavoidable, but when that’s happening on a massive scale across your entire country, maybe there’s a better way.
And if you don’t want it to drop that low, then you need to take steps to address the fact that people aren’t having children. The first is you need to raise pay and increase working conditions and stability. But of course the rich assholes don’t want to pay for that. Another option would be to allow for foreign workers to come in and gain citizenship, but if you give them citizenship then they will create laws that will prevent companies from fucking them over. Rich assholes and racists don’t like that.
Some of us feel it’s better to have fewer (or no) people in this world. If you ascribe to that philosophy then a declining birth rate from people choosing not to procreate is the most humane way to achieve that, with genocide and eugenics being obviously evil. I do believe things will be difficult for the aging population, and even more difficult for the young who are forced to care for them.
I have lived in a town dying from the exodus of young people. I was in 8th grade when the school became too small to maintain and my bus ride tripled in length, but I was suddenly in a class of 32 instead of 6. It is indeed sad, and it looks worse every time I visit. It’s like a person in hospice fading away. I do truly mourn for the history and culture that is lost. But I also personally believe the suffering humans inflict and endure outweighs what the universe will lose.
Infinite growth is impossible. It doesn’t matter if we achieve luxury gay space communism, there is a maximum comfortable limit to the population based on technology and resource balance.
We need depopulation, or perfect terra forming technology. Since we don’t have the latter, encouraging a voluntary form of the former is good until we do.