Japan sees record drop in population – DW
Japan sees record drop in population – DW
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Japan sees record drop in population – DW – 04/14/2025
109 comments
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I keep saying it all the time
It isn't about the QUANTITY of life
It's about the QUALITY of life
What sense does it make if you raise your population and everyone is miserably poor or on the edge of becoming poor?
It makes more sense if you just concentrate on making life more manageable, comfortable and sensible for the population you already have. Once you have a comfortable stable population of people who no longer worry about their future .... then they will be more likely to have a family.
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What sense does it make if you raise your population and everyone is miserably poor or on the edge of becoming poor?
I mean, misery is extremely relative. One of the paradoxes of Japan, thanks to its extremely conservative immigration policy and hyper-competitive economy, is that they've made a genuinely beautiful country to live in but one in which foreigners can't stay and most natives can't enjoy it. This population of NEETs who failed the cut-throat academic setting lack the resources to live a comfortable middle class existence. Meanwhile, the new guest worker program simply brings foreigners in to crush the wage labor out and dispose of them. Only foreign tourists, wealthy labor aristocrats, and the handful of small business owners who figured out how to survive get to enjoy Japan for what it is.
But, like, it shouldn't be a miserable place to live. The amenities are world class. The country's ecology is well-preserved. The education system rivals international peers. They've got advanced industry, mass transit, modern health care, spectacular recreation, a population large enough to keep the ball rolling indefinitely without going Easter Island on their own turf, and excellent placement adjacent to other post-industrial powers.
All they need to do is reform their abysmal work culture. But the work culture has become a tulpa they're convinced creates the beatific conditions, rather than a cancer that's destroying it.
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+1 for correct understanding of "tulpa". We need to be aware of our ideas and ideals we create and sustain. Not all tulpas are what we envision. They are, otoh, all teaching spirit-guides.
Beautifully articulated!
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without going Easter Island on their own turf
what does this mean
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The education system rivals international peers.
Almost all true except this part. The Japanese education system is actually pretty bad compared to most Western countries.
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On the one hand, yes having a child with a higher quality of life is better than having many children.
However, there's a good Kurzgesagt video about how the severe decline in birthrate can doom a population. Basically, if a population is not at the very least replacing itself, it will run out of young workers to keep the country going and vastly skew the proportion of elderly people to young workers. Small, rural towns will not survive since young people will flock to cities for work.
Though the video is based on Korea, the same concepts apply for Japan as well.
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The logical, healthy approach to natural population growth and maintenance would be to provide social protections and supports for families and young people to grow into a society where they are encouraged and helped to start a family of one or two children in order to supply a healthy steady supply of new people for future generations.
Unfortunately, our world is governed by sociopathic wealthy overlords who demand more from people and want to give less to them. It's not all their fault because the majority of us all sit around and just passively accept it as just a normal part of society. What that will probably mean is that in the future it will be a strange form of population control where children are no longer born but they will be manufactured and bred in order to provide a steady supply of human resources to keep the profit driven capitalist machine running for wealthy overlords.
From the look of how we managed our society in the past century ... we won't solve this problem sensibly, or with any empathy for society as a whole but rather try to deal with it from an economic and financial point of view. The wealthy owning class don't see humanity as a whole that should be supported in any kind of healthy way ... they see humanity as a source of wealth and a group of thinking individuals that can be taken advantage of to extract wealth for owners rather than for the whole of society.
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"fear of decline"
also, your argument is based on the totally-nonsense assumption that there "has to be a certain number of workers to sustain the elderly" which is bullshit (frankly). it's not about the number of workers; it's about the productive output, and as we all know, that has risen tremendously the last few years. So there should be no shortage of workers regardless of how many workers there are. Everything else is bullshit the news (which btw are owned by billionaires) tell you because they want to sack a significant part of productive output for themselves - well ofc if rich take 90% of output it's not gonna be enough for everyone. but that's the rich's fault and has nothing to do with "there not being enough workers".
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It makes more sense if you just concentrate on making life more manageable, comfortable and sensible for the population you already have.
And working age people are necessary to make (and keep) life manageable, comfortable and sensible. This isn't a hypothetical; they're suffering the effects already. We'd need to lean a lot more into automation before society can function as an inverse pyramid.
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Or, we could transition away from people doing made up jobs that don't need to exist to doing things that actually need to get done
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Hear me out for a wild idea: businesses could offer living wages, benefits, and work-love balance.
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One of the most overcrowded, expensive, energy- and arable land-poor nations on earth with an unemployment crisis and comical economic inefficiency is facing a population decline.
Oh no.
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It is not an inverse pyramid though. The older humans are the more likely they die. So you always and up with a pyramide at the top, at least somewhat. With low birth rates a society has to care for fewer children. That results in an actually fairly stable ratio of working age population to dependents.
A shrinking population also means build infrastructure is already built. They just have to keep things running.
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Totally agree.
It's nearly impossible in rich areas for young people to afford a family sized house and daycare.
We need to solve those problems if we want young people to have families.
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But this idea that more people leads to lower quality of life… that’s 1980s overpopulation panic talking.
Japan’s quality of life is suffering because they don’t have enough working age people to support their society.
Literally, we are going to have some difficulties in the coming decades because we don’t have enough people.
I’m not saying more people is always better, or that we have no limits. But when there are more old people than young people, that’s a bad situation, plain and simple.
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Once you have a comfortable stable population of people who no longer worry about their future .... then they will be more likely to have a family.
Somehow India is an exception to this. People worry about the future and still have kids. Nearly every married couple I know has at least one child or planning for one.
I don't get it.
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Because all forms of poverty are not the same. It's only confusing if you insist on measuring things in dollars instead of stability. If they own their own land, a subsistence farmer in rural India has a much more secure and stable life than a precarious retail worker in the US. Yes, the precarious retail worker might have more trinkets and consumer goods than the Indian farmer, but the Indian farmer owns their own livelihood.
Having a child is ultimately an act of selflessness and generosity. People have children when they are fairly confident that they will be able to ensure those children will enjoy a quality of life that they find acceptable. And "acceptable" is context dependent. If they own their own land, a subsistence farmer in rural India can have a couple kids and guarantee that their children will have a secure future. If nothing else, they can pass the farm onto their children. At the worst, the farmer's children will have the same standard of living as the farmer. Most such farmers would hope their children would get an education and do even better than they did. But if nothing else they can always just take over the farm. The same isn't true for a wage slave working for Walmart. The Walmart worker knows their existence is incredibly precarious. If rents spike again and wages don't keep up, they will be living on the street. Their existence is precarious, and few people want to bring children into such a precarious life.
Stability is the key to birth rates. It has nothing to do with dollars earned. A US retail worker makes far more dollars in wages than the market value of the Indian subsistence farmer's crops. But the US retail worker has to live in a much, much more expensive country. And the Indian subsistence farmer owns their own land, a plot that's been in the family for generations. They don't have to pay rent. They don't have to worry about getting fired. The only thing they have to worry about is crop failures. But farmers have had to worry about those since the dawn of time.
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It's because it's not quite true. Reproductive rates are inversely correlated with wealth and education. If you're poor, you need more kids to help the family (and, morbidly, even more kids in case some die due to lack of healthcare), especially once you yourself become elderly. When you're secure, you end up not doing that.
But if you're secure, but the world sucks, you say "why would I want to bring a child into this?"
If you want to maintain a population, you need to create the conditions for people to want to have kids, and give them the opportunity. Separately, you should also want to give your citizens a high standard of living.
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Having kids is a lot more expensive when you're wealthy/middle class than when you're poor (most of the costs like food, education, etc directly vary with your already existent quality of life), so to poor people it's a lot easier to make the decision to have another kid. Also I don't know about India but for example in my (third world) country daycare isn't a necessity in the same way it is in the West so that's part of the equation too.
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What sense does it make if you raise your population and everyone is miserably poor or on the edge of becoming poor?
There's an overall negative correlation between wealth and fertility, so it's not like the rich are having a ton of kids, either. Or even the societies with decent metrics on wealth or income equality, still tend to be low birth rate countries.
It's a difficult problem, with no one solution (because it's not one cause). Some of it is cultural. Some of it is economic. There are a lot of feedback effects and peer effects, too. And each society has its own mix of cultural and economic issues.
And I'm not actually disagreeing with you. I think there's probably something to be said for cheap cost of living allowing for people to be more comfortable having more children (or at a younger age, which also mathematically grows populations faster than having the same number of children at an older age).
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offer me eternity,
and I'll trade a cup of coffee and a dime looking for a handout
on behalf of those who have so little timebut who wants to live on just 70 cents a day? padding your pockets doesn't make this a better place
"cereal and water" is a feast for some you say
your price-tag on existence can't cover your double facequality or quantity: a choice you have to make
dipping in the icing
bringing home the largest turkey from the field
breaking all the piggy banks, scooping up the booty
licking all the right holes, bolstering the payrollwhy reduce life to a dollar amount per day?
and why let the world think this is the American way?
your uneaten greens are a feast for some you say
survival and living are concepts you can't equatequality or quantity: don't tell me they're the same
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My two cents with a decade in Japan under my belt:
- work-life balance needs to be fixed (there are recent laws helping this, but not enough enforcement)
- sexism in work (salary gap and gap in leadership is one of the highest in the world)
- do more based on merit than seniority in a number of areas
- more jobs and good universities need to be moved outside of the big city centers; daycare availability is a HUGE problem for people I know with kids or looking to have them (whereas in the countryside where I live, they have free daycare slots available but far fewer jobs and opportunities). This would involve some investment in infra to make things happen as well
- better investment in education and some revamping of the education system; kids are almost never held back here and once they get into uni it's often seen as a free ride to graduation at many schools; this is not the best system for producing the best innovators and Japan needs innovation
- better progress toward digitization; we're woefully behind the times even as many are dragged, kicking and screaming, into more things being online. I still have to send faxes and postal mail to accomplish many things relating to government and taxes. This has a number of costs such as taking time off work to accomplish things in person. Banks are also only open 9-3 M-F with some occasionally having weekend hours. Same with all but an area's "main" post office and other things that just eat into that work-life balance problem by requiring use of time off.
- better education in and participation in government and civics; very few people vote in Japan and I'd like to see that change as I think more engagement would help the people better determine what is best for their future.
Edit to add that the above excludes anything related to immigration as I don't really know the right answer/balance there; the above are things that could help immediately without as much handwaving about "destroying our cultural values!" that some complain about by suggesting such daring things as married Japanese couples having separate surnames (illegal in Japan; if both are Japanese, they must unify to one name).
Edit 2: just saw this elsewhere talking about some changes coming: https://leglobal.law/countries/japan/looking-ahead-2025-japan/
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They've done nothing, and it's still not improving!
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They have to make it easier for them to have families, the men have to be taught to support the family more, and the salary man has to disappear. That's my outside, doesn't know that much, opinion.
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The salary man? What's that?
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Traditional Japan work culture where you're not allowed to go home until your boss goes home. Boss hates his family and will twiddle his thumbs until 10pm and then say you have to come out for drinks until 2am. If you don't comply, your life will be made hell, and there will be a zero chance of career growth.
This type of culture coupled with shit economy has turbo dived Japanes population growth. There's 10-million "abandoned" homes in Japan, IE old person died alone and you can buy a fully furnished home for $7-50k. Honestly, I'm look at Japan as a place to move and at some point they're going to advertise to open the doors for immigration or completely revamp their work culture....or go extinct as a country.
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"We understand that the declining birthrate is continuing because many people who wish to raise children are not able to fulfill their wishes," Hayashi said.
That’s just a single neutrino in a supergiant star of a problem.
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People aren't just wageslaves. If there are many, it's easy to see people as a "mass product". If there are fewer, i hope that any individual will be seen with higher value.
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And, you know, more land and water and clean air for them.
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The US in 10 years.
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Not if they destroy education and ban abortions.
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That's the plan. Will it work? Probably not. But that won't keep us from doing it just like of all the other bad policy.
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The US has immigration
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Not if Trump and Steven Miller have anything to do with it.
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I just want to notice that most people have been told by the economy in recent years that more people are needed to fulfill all jobs because the economists wanted to increase the supply of workers and therefore push the wages down.
Recently, economists have started understanding that this (AI) wave of automation/innovation might indeed be the last one, the one that reduces demand for human labor without creating more new jobs as a side-product. As such, the number of workers needed declines. Since economists would favor lower taxes, they try to limit Universal Basic Income to a minimum, but that implies fewer people to pay for. As such, they are taking a "lower fertility rate is better" stance now. We're gonna see a lot of "news articles telling us that the falling birth rate is a good thing" in the near future. It just takes a significant effort to spread that message in the population.
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I mean, it would be great if the global population was lower, whilst also not creating aging population issues. Automation plus UBI seems a lot better than "everyone kill grandma". Big issue being that those that own the automation don't want to pay forUBI.
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Legalize weed, get more liberal, and allow some immigration and my useless ass would love to live there
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Yea no, stay in the US thanks
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Yes, Prime Minister
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It doesn't help that they pretty much make it so that you're either an English teacher or something else really specific, otherwise you ain't finding a job over there...
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Doesn't help what? Dealing with the systemic issues of work culture, sexism, etc. would be a good start to helping.
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Why would I want to move there to only get a job as an English teacher? That literally sucks. I'm not dismissing your thought, I'm just stating my opinion....
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We need to investigate this immediately. If they've discovered Stargate technology and are quietly slipping out the back exit to somewhere habitable (and even that's negotiable for a short-term stop), I'm not getting stuck here when that door slams shut on our impending apocalypse.
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I saw this anime.
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There was a recent kurzgesagt video about this and it really is gonna be a huge problem
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Demographics falling is bad because of inflation targeting. Everyone must consume 2% more this year than they did last year, so the money supply must grow dramatically as demographics age and spending slows.
The mortgage then acts as a gatekeeper in our fiat system, by locking up an inelastic good necessary for survival and procreation behind a paywall that scales with low interest rates, and can only be unlocked by taking on a mortgage and completing the payment obligations. This ensures that the financial system has a steady stream of obligations that help sustain the flow of currency, every new mortgage is new money supply that benefits existing asset holders.
What we need is to get rid of mortgages. People then need to pay cash or rent, no cheap loans, all loans go toward productivity investment and startups. The government can then build high density rentals near mass transit.
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How will you build wealth without mortgages and just paying cash? Then most people wouldn't be able to afford to buy a home, they would always be slaves to rent. No mortgages plays right into the hand of the wealthy few that can exploit the renters.
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House prices rise to max out available credit. If that credit vanishes then prices will fall, as people need to save their own money to buy, and they don't benefit from the cantillon effect raising asset values.
House prices are inversely correlated with interest rates, and housing bubbles popup wherever QE is done as a mortgage is a net short position on the purchasing power of cash.
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Japan is relying more and more on a shadow army of millions of imported foreign workers that is slowly changing its populace. Japan could see a right wing backlash to the changing demographics at some point as we've seen in Europe.
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“Shadow army”, you mean people, immigrants for low wage jobs in convenience stores and cleaners.
Hardly an organized “army” lol.
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One also can't even get a working visa to work some place like a cleaner or convenience store; those people are all on: student with parttime job permit; spouse/family/dependent; PR; and working holiday visas.
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It's a metaphor, not "literal" army. And it is in the millions. Many are unseen as they come out when the streets are empty doing the garbage picking and cleaning, etc.
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Source? I live in Japan and have no idea what you're referring to here. Japan already has its share of xenophobic fuckwits, particularly the old right-wing guys, but I don't think people are generally trending that way. The one exception might be people living in places inundated with tourists who are tired of that aspect.
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They're not saying that Japanese people are trending that way, but rather that they will inevitably go that way for the same reasons America did and Europe is. The reason it's not happening yet is because Japan simply doesn't have enough foreigners yet; the cutoff seems from Europe's track record to be around 5%. More than that and they start getting scapegoated for all sorts of problems.
As seen in this map (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Europe#/media/File:Islam_in_Europe-2010.svg), percentage of obviously foreign people (in this case Muslims) and far-right politics are strongly correlated and other than Italy all European countries with a strong far right have more than 5% Muslims.
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Japan could see a right wing backlash to the changing demographics at some point as we've seen in Europe.
They'd need to import a lot more before that happens (it seems 5% of the population being visibly foreign is the cutoff), but otherwise all the pieces are already in place. If America doesn't survive Trump democracy is gonna die isn't it?
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