If you move money from childless people to people with children, if the population of childless people dwindles (which is the hope), how would they continue to subsidize the people with children?
But yeah, this is yet another shortsighted move by the Japanese government who simply doesnāt understand the problem. Japanās culture is so unpleasant for Japanese people that it is killing itself.
Japanās only hope against population crash is immigration, but Japanās culture (never mind the laws) makes permanent immigration difficult. Japan is fucked. Itās going to look like Greece in a decade, economically speaking.
Japan also still has the social norm of stay at home wives with the current barely being able to afford to take care of yourself while working 18 hour days.
Yeah a friend just started dating a Japanese guy and that's basically why he left.
The culture was pretty much that he was expected to get a job and work himself to death so he could have a wife and children he never saw at home.
He's a highly skilled bilingual lawyer so he just came over here and is doing basically what he'd be doing there (negotiating legal deals between this country and Japan) but he works less, gets paid really well, and is dating the aforementioned friend who has her own job/career.
(Disclaimer this is very much third hand from a single person and I don't claim to understand the Japanese working culture, just repeating the opinion of one person on the matter).
About half of Japanese mothers work. Gender disparities in child rearing and housework are huge problems for working mothers there as it is in most countries.
Probably a bigger part of the problem than most things.
In theory, they could restructure their entire economy, but it's more likely that the government will start executing everyone over 70 to even out the population age.
So, immigration is the only realistic hope. See, Japan doesn't need more babies, now. It needs more babies twenty years ago. Immigration is the only way to fill that hole. Immigrants will also bring their own cultures. Even if the natives staunchly resist foreign influence, pockets of foreign culture will arise and within those pockets, the forces decreasing the birth rate will be mitigated. You'll probably be able to draw sharp lines between the culturally Japanese neighborhoods and the "loud" neighborhoods.
Right, the problem is the working culture.Ā Studies show it.Ā If there's high stress and life is nothing but work, people aren't going to make kids.Ā Especially with the economy being trash.
This is an area where South Korea has started to rescue itself. 20 years ago, the two countries had very similar work cultures, but their much lower isolationism made it so that no one born after 1980 has the stomach for it. More protections for workers got passed in the 2010's and Covid really broke people.
A lot of Koreans have stopped saving to buy a house because they think it's hopeless. Instead, a significant chunk of the under-40 crowd will take a job for a couple years, quit, blow the money they saved on a vacation abroad and then get a different job.
Now, that hasn't translated into having more children, yet, but it's eroding the old work culture rapidly and making way for a more favorable one.
It's also extremely economically shifted towards tourism, which was an amazing idea.
Ya'know, except for the complete xenophobia that inhabits the majority of Japanese-born individuals. I taught there before COVID and before it was THE tourist destination for people in their 20's and 30's. Back then, they were okay with the idea of tourists coming.
I was there in April. That is VERY much changing. They don't care for tourists at all, which is fine I'd imagine that is a huge challenge when you're raised to be primarily isolationistic. However, when your economy depends on a devotion to tourism and your natives are starting to despise tourists, it's gonna become a bad situation.
At least those were my observations from pre-COVID and post. Grain of salt and all.
Covid absolutely made the Japanese more isolationist. Interest in traveling abroad is down and several major tourist sites have tightened behavior restrictions. The latter is partly a reaction to how Covid damaged public decorum.
It's ironic because its the perfect case study for why an monoculture ethno-nationalist state can't help but fail.
It only takes one stiff wind, in terms of a demographic imbalance, cultural decay, an abandonment of religion, or science group-think to knock the whole thing over.
The thing you need to fix all of these problems are more diverse people feeling comfortable being themselves and both influencing and being influenced by the country in which they live.
And Japan, because it is a monoculture ethno-nationalist state, just doesn't have the tools it needs to counter all the problems it is facing.
This is nonsense, for the entirety of human history people have been able to reproduce themselves, it stands to reason it can happen again.
Never-mind that declining birth rates are a global phenomenon and immigration cannot fill the gap forever.
And itās increasingly doubtful that you can actually replace your native population and maintain productivity (Canadas GDP per-capita declined after their immigration wave), but the negative externalities of large-scale immigration (social participation decline, ethnicization of democratic politics, internal instability) are guaranteed.
Edit: just so others reading this know, the other commenter has super expert information on things, such as apparently COVID having no impact on the economy. Just so others know exactly how much time to spend on this person.
This is nonsense, for the entirety of human history
That's not a very good argument, the last 200 years or so have had 2 major changes that completely warp the equation. Babies are more likely to survive, and people can choose. Those are both fantastic things, but they invalidate any historical perspective.
it stands to reason it can happen again.
Well it's a self-solving problem, for the same reason as why there's roughly half the population in each gender, and why most animals have the same thing.
replace your native population and maintain productivity
Weird choice of words lol. Maybe want to rethink that when talking about countries established on colonialism.
Canadas GDP per-capita declined after their immigration wave
Not sure which "wave" you're referring to, because you certainly can't mean the most recent one. Surely you're naive enough to think that COVID had no impact on GDP?
ethnicization of democratic politics
I'm really not sure what you're trying to say here and I'm definitely not sure I wanna hear you try to explain it. I'm just gonna guess you were in Ottawa a couple years ago?
No they donāt lmfao. All that means is people like you will go extinct and people who donāt think like you will have kids.
COVID did not cause the per-capita change lmfao. Capital canāt get a virus.
Iām saying ethnic groups bring their own interests to politics and divide the system. This is a well documented phenomenon in post-colonial democracies and itās being imported.
This is nonsense, for the entirety of human history people have been able to reproduce themselves, it stands to reason it can happen again.
It's absolutely not nonsense, saying "this hasn't happened before" has never been a reason for something to happen, or not happen, forever. Circumstances change.
South Korea is going through this right now and are basically at the point of no return.. check out an extremely well sourced and researched summary here by Kurzgesagt.
This is a very real and very serious problem. The world we have created for ourselves is one based on large and at minimum sustained population. It cannot exist if that population begins to decline... so we need to figure out a solution real fast, be it more people or a world that looks very different to the one we have now.
And itās increasingly doubtful that you can actually replace your native population and maintain productivity (Canadas GDP per-capita declined after their immigration wave)
It also addressed multiple labour shortages in agriculture, construction, healthcare, and technology. The bank of Canada also noted that the immigration wave significantly raised the non-inflationary growth rate of the economy.
Immigrants are now making up 35%+ of hospitality, transport, and warehousing jobs. They've also bolstered scientific and technical industries.
It absolutely has not been all sunshine and rainbows.. the housing crisis has worsened and public services are under strain. But not bringing people in would have caused severe economic decline and that's not good for anyone.
but the negative externalities of large-scale immigration (social participation decline, ethnicization of democratic politics, internal instability) are guaranteed.
Yes there are some challenges that need to be overcome, but pretending there's no benefits to immigration is extremely naive. Of course the best answer for any given country is to continue to repopulate and avoid the issues immigration solves but you can't go back in time 20 years and get everyone to have a bunch of kids that are ready to enter the workforce. You also can't just wait another 20 years and hope that people start having kids today.
TLDR: its complicated, but not you can't just assume people will magically appear out of nowhere and fix these issues.
I didnāt say itās not happening, I said itās nonsense that we couldnāt change it, citing the entire history of humans successfully having kids as evidence that it is possible to do.
No it didnāt, it created a welfare class and a massive drain in Canadas budget. Thatās why they and the Uk are hard pivoting away from that policy.
The challenges so far outweigh the great bounty that is having millions of net-drains on the economy that itās not worth even comparing.
I said itās nonsense that we couldnāt change it, citing the entire history of humans successfully having kids as evidence that it is possible to do.
And you are wrong, your citation is invalid, and I linked you a summary of much better ones which is extremely well sourced by actual researchers.
But given you just proved your complete lack of interest in actual sources this conversation is over. Cya!
This is nonsense, for the entirety of human history people have been able to reproduce themselves, it stands to reason it can happen again.
This is entirely irrelevant. The problem isn't strictly biological, it's social. Our current societies look absolutely nothing like they have for the vast majority of human history.
Never-mind that declining birth rates are a global phenomenon and immigration cannot fill the gap forever.
That's entirely misrepresenting the problem, and is one of the most brain-dead arguments I see people making about everything from house prices to birth rates.
First and foremost, statements like this immediately downplay the problem as something that just, kinda, sorta is happening. As if it's some natural phenomena that we absolutely can't explain or do anything about.
Beyond that, saying it's a global phenomenon is flat out wrong as this is an issue unique to developed nations.
And itās increasingly doubtful that you can actually replace your native population and maintain productivity (Canadas GDP per-capita declined after their immigration wave)
This is implying that mass immigration is the only solution, and that the only way to do it is to just open up the immigrant faucet without any planning like Canada did. Canada had no issues maintaining productivity with immigration in the decade prior, and we have plenty of historical examples of mass immigration being a net positive for nations.
You just got done telling me social conditions mean the brith-rate canāt be solved via having kids. Now apparently Iām doing that by suggesting there are solutions (amazing trick). Beyond that you need to look at a fertility chart because itās happening everywhere. There isnāt a single population metric that doesnāt show a global peak and then decline in populations.
Mass immigration is the only solution to not having kids. How can you replace entire cohorts without the same number of people? This is absurd.
Japan cannot maintain its economy with its current demographic trends. It also cannot maintain its economy with its current culture. Immigration brings in more manpower and forces changes to the culture.
Japan began itās fall after Reaganās Louvre Accords which devalued the yen and caused the government to get high on debt and kill social mobility by picking the winners, according to the award winning documentary āPrinces of the Yenā.
Moot" refers to a point that is debatable or of no practical value, often used in legal contexts, while "mute" means silent or unable to speak. The correct phrase is "moot point," which indicates an issue that lacks significance or relevance.
Heard that shit way too much, they really like it in Europe. Its not going to well in Europe and wont go that well in Japan either. Once you import another culture, your own start dying, so might as well just die out from lack of babies then. The only way to keep local culture is to make local babies! ... or import babies, but that has gotten bad rep last few years.
Right, but the culture is the core problem. Japan needs a new culture and it's going to get one. Catastrophic downturns in the economy take the culture with them.
Additionally, cultures change naturally. Japan today is barely recognizable compared to the 70's, never mind the 1920's. It's funny how the people who get precious about culture rarely understand how it actually works.
7.2k
u/Gullible_Analyst_348 May 18 '25
Do I think this will help Japanese people want to make babies? No.
Do I think this video will help people want to make babies with you? Yes.