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.
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.
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.
Management issues… I know what can help… Introduce Agile.
People now realise that kids are a lot of hard work and fucking expensive…and that yearly skiing holidays are fun.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
You can tell capitalism is super efficient and sustainable by how it totally collapses without fresh babies to sacrifice.
Give them some days off.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Countries all across the world
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate
Isn’t it interesting that the more “developed” countries have the lowest birth rates.
It’s what follows education. It’s the largely uneducated areas of the world that still raw dog like there’s no tomorrow.
Solid racism. Even if your correlation is “accurate” (according to imperial definitions/measurements of “education”), that’s not causation.
People also tend to have more kids when the life expectancy of their kids if very low. Colonized people have low life expectancy because their labor and resources are exploited by the privileged.
This is just fucking dumb
Pointing out an objective fact isn’t racism, it just is.
My understanding is that lower fertility follows higher female education for several reasons, including that women in school - and with access to birth control - prefer to wait until finishing school and starting a career before having children. Countries where women have fewer educational and fewer career opportunities, people often start having babies sooner, and more babies overall.
Another oft-mentioned factor is social safety nets such as social security (as much as that can count as a safety net). Areas with no or weak elder support outside of the family tend to have bigger families. Shockingly, this was also the case in the “developed” world back before they developed. Ask older adults in the USA how many brothers and sisters their grandparents had and it is probably a lot more than the next generation had, and the next, etc.
Do colonized people have lower life expectancy or do their children? Or both? Certainly, exploited people may also be living in (and unable to escape from) a society with poor elder care and insufficient safety nets such as social security or other retirement options. Which, of course, makes having lots of kids a totally rational decision. And also limits the ability of many women to participate in the economy outside of the home, which can also slow the development of the country / area’s economy.
So apparently under Sharia law, Muslim men can have anal sex with a girl under 8, and vaginal with a girl over 8.
And Muslims can openly lie about what is and isn’t true under Sharia law???
No, Muslims cannot openly lie about what is and isn’t true under sharia law. Islamic jurisprudence is a thing. It’s pretty important to Muslims to know what they can or can’t do.
There are different traditions (remember - there are Sunnis and Shias as the largest groups, some more obscure splinters, and splinters off of Sunni and Shia). Not everyone accepts the same Hadith, and there are, ya know, like more than thirteen centuries of interpretations and various schools. (Like, people get Islamic law degrees - that’s kinda why the medieval Muslim world was pretty well known for education, you needed the madrassas to be teaching people this stuff)
I have never heard the idea that anal sex was permissible in Islam. The Hadith cited in my link I think are direct enough that basically all traditions would accept them outright.
I don’t understand the 8 years old distinction bit (maybe something to do with the heinous child rape involved in bacha bazi - but that would not be considered permissible by Islamic scholars)
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.
Seems super likely that capitalism is going to be a major factor in our extinction. Maybe we could have a bit less of it and actually survive as a species
The major shareholders have voted down your proposal.
I actually agree with this. Capitalism presumes infinite resources.
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.
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.
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.
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.
requiring 100 year multi-generational loans
This is the first I’ve heard of this and the fact that it’s real is insane to me.
Because it’s BS. It’s glaringly fake and calls into question the rest of the claims of the post.
Housing prices aren’t even insane, especially outside of Tokyo. And the property prices don’t even go up. AND you can get 35 year housing loans at under 1% interest. The main reason housing prices have gone up at all is that construction materials cost have gone up due to inflation, Ukraine war, covid supply and demand issues.
I guess it works pretty differently to our system where you borrow x money at y interest rate then? Because otherwise a slight interest rate change has a huge impact, or paying slightly more back would reduce the time to pay it by decades.
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
The only country in the world with a worse work culture than the US is Japan.
China too.
The only country in the world with a worse work culture than the US is Japan
What about North Korea?
Not really relevant. I mean technically there are countries with child slavery so I guess if you want to entirely miss the point on purpose you could go with one of those.
I wasn’t really being serious, I knew you were talking about developed nations.
You mean The People’s Republic of Korea? They’re a communist utopia, aren’t they? /S
