How is Japan in such a big pickle with the population shrinking. If an economy is based on a kids being born so they grow and sustain the aging population, how did Japan, a country known for their meticulous approach to everything, got themselves in this situation. For sure they must have seen it coming 20-30 years ago.
What went wrong? If they got it worn, how do we have it right? With the government not providing any kind of meaningful incentives for families to have kids, when will the 24th hour come for the rest of us?
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Kids are very expensive. Back in the olden days, kids were cheap labor for your farm so people had many. Also.. Women focusing on careers. Increase in birth control. Declines in testosterone also probably play a large role.
People in Japan are very career driven, this gets in the way of reproduction.
I’ve heard this career-first mentality not as bad now as in the past, but it is still there.
>With the government not providing any kind of meaningful incentives for families to have kids, when will the 24th hour come for the rest of us?
Government incentives are ineffective at preventing fertility decline in every country they have been tried. I suppose ending it would require some sort of major social change in how people think about family versus career.
Japanese Woman don’t want to be full time moms which is what is expected of them. Japanese Men don’t want to be dads, they just want to grind at work have a wife and kids and be present in the shadows.
There is no room for compromise. With those being the extreme expectation for each sex, thus no kids.
I rarely saw my dad growing up. Hence I make it a point to be home and help with dinner. Then just survive the chaos with my also working spouse.
I swear it would be so much easier if I just grinder away at work for 12 plus hours and came home and did nothing. But then what’s the point of a family if I don’t actually spend time with them.
This would obviously mean my wife couldn’t be a professional and would have to take the whole house / child duties. Which she would not want to do. So we compromised both holding back our careers in exchange for our kids. The Japanese don’t want to do that.
Sex is a recreational activity people engage in when they have time doing little else. For a long time winter would produce a lot of pregnancies because of the time spent together with little else to do. Summer was also common because it was neither planting season nor harvesting season.
A full year work cycle does not make romance easy.
Birth control reduces unwanted pregnancies.
Stress reduces the sex drive.
People come home tired, live poor, have little leisure time, don’t feel up to having sex, don’t have enough to support children. So they have fewer children on average.
It’s not just a Japan situation. Every nation with highly developed cities first filled the cities, and now need a constant stream of movement into the city to sustain the population. So the overall birthrate declines.
Governments have their limitations. This is one of the basic principles of free market capitalism. Recent history shows that governments can do some good but also get things really wrong when they try to centrally plan economies.
No government in the world today (yet?) has been able to force their populations to have kids although some have tried to incentivize it. This appears to be a line that no society crosses. Unfortunately, these incentives have generally proven to not be very effective.
Beyond this, tackling this subject gets into the perilous areas of social engineering, religious predisposition and gender equality. Some will claim that loss of “family values” are a big factor, or the relative irreligiosity of youth. Women participating in the workforce, for example, is cited as both necessary for gender equality and yet also the reason for lowered fertility. It is hardly surprising that society (not to mention governments) don’t really know how to deal with this matter.
It is also pretty standard for most societies in developed economies to believe that (higher) education is necessary for future success. And higher education is expensive and time consuming. Having young people (especially women) be in school for 20 years before entering the job market and then taking 10 years to build a career puts them at the edge of the biological window for reproduction unless they are willing to sacrifice time off their careers for at least initial child rearing OR risk having children in their late 30’s (mostly safe but still more risky) or 40’s (very much more risky)
There are no simple or low cost solutions. These issues are very tricky to navigate and slow to show results.
They definitely knew about it 20 to 30 years ago. This has been discussed since the 80s in Japan and Europe. Japanese are relatively cautious in their approach to implementing policies and they haven’t been able to get ahead of the problem. They just keep falling behind.
The key reasons:
* Japanese are simply having less kids. There are many reasons that varies per person. Common reasons are declining sex drive, commitment to career, lack of wanting to get married or parents not wanting children until they are stable themselves.
* Lack of *effective* government policies to promote children. In some European countries there is extended parental leave, childcare subsidies or government payments. Japan is trying, but that haven’t found the right formula yet.
* Lack of immigration. Japan has relatively stricter immigration rules. Countries like USA (14% are immigrants) and Germany (18% are immigrants) are pro-immigration compared to Japan with 2% immigrants. I’ve seen sources stating the 2% immigrants includes foreign workers of which most won’t be staying in Japan. Getting permanent residency and citizenship in Japan is not easy.
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The broad cultural and economic causes of the “demographic transition” is wide spread, from Japan to Europe but Japan has a few wrinkles that make the problem particularly acute.
-Japan has a very traditional idea of motherhood and the stay a home mom. So in order to get around that career oriented women, just don’t have kids, or put off having kids.
-Japan has traditionally been opposed to immigration on a mass scale (although this is starting to change). Generally speaking immigrant families have higher birth rates and as they integrate over a few generations, their birth rate aligns with the native population.
-Japanese work culture is rooted in seniority and thus the guy who is always in the office and goes out for drinks after work is more likely to get ahead career wise, even if they are overworking themselves to the point of less productivity.
-Japan is simply further down the road then some of its contemporaries, In 1960 for instance the birth rate for an American women for 3.65 and for a Canadian it was 3.81 children per women. Japan however had a birthrate of just 2.0 children per women. All three nations have seen a decline in birthrate since then, but when it comes to demographics momentum means a lot.
>If an economy is based on a kids being born
It’s not. It just a massive impact on the economy and the cost of things.
> a country known for their meticulous approach to everything,
(Pft, well that’s some bias right there)
>What went wrong?
The 90’s crash. “The lost decade.” Which never really ended so now they just call it “the lost decades”. The nation is up to their eyeballs in debt and can’t do much. The debt-holders are mostly Japanese (mostly Bank of Japan) and aren’t going to let anything come crashing down, but they’re not going to let go. Japan over-spent and went massively into debt. The nation faced stagnation and people’s income and wealth were depressed and it’s hard to have a kid when you’re working to the bone.
>If they got it worn, how do we have it right?
Immigration. Japan just doesn’t really let anyone in. We bring in all sorts of people, but above board and on the down-low.
> With the government not providing any kind of meaningful incentives for families to have kids,
(PFT, we DO give people more welfare if they have more kids. That’s been it’s own little pickle.)
>when will the 24th hour come for the rest of us?
[Around 2086](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth), probably latter in wealthier nations that people want to migrate to. We’ll probably feel the effects from the slowing population growth before then.
Also, think about our culture. It’s get a good education, get a good starting job, work hard and build a good career – all of that is happening between ages 16 and 35, our peak biological fertility zone.
We aren’t leaving enough space for young men and women to meet one another, date, pair bond and start families.
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