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Japan's Population Falls At Fastest Rate Since 1968
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Japan's population, excluding resident foreigners, fell at the beginning of this year at its fastest pace since comparable figures were kept in 1968, highlighting the demographic challenge to economic growth. As of Jan. 1, the number of Japanese people fell by a record 308,084 from a year earlier to 125,583,658, marking the eighth consecutive year of declines, government data showed Wednesday. The number of births fell 2.9 percent from the previous year ago to 981,202, the lowest since comparable data became available in 1974. People aged 65 or older accounted for 27.2 percent of the total population, the highest ratio on record, while the ratio of those aged 14 or younger fell to a record low of 12.7 percent, the data showed. The number of registered foreign residents increased to 2,323,428, up 6.9 percent from a year earlier, according to the data.
This has really got to do with Japanese women's roles in society and opportunities.
Japanese society says to Japanese women you can either have a child or a career . Seems Japanese woman are choosing a Career.
The times are a changing my friend.....
The natural end result of psychopathic capitalism, https://www.anabolicmen.com/st..., the endless rabid dog, eat rabid dog (sane healthy dogs do not eat each other) stress cycle. The whole of government and society orientated to exploitation of the majority to feed the insatiable psychopathic greed of the minority, produces the stresses which cripple the long term outcome for those societies. Why they fuck would you choose to feed your children to the fires of psychopathic capitalism, just say no, seriously what do you lose, stress and worry until the day you die for children you force into a self destructive system that will endeavour to prey upon them (seriously that is the current goal, prey upon as many others as possible to be celebrated and worshipped by main stream media), this versus well, nothing but something close to living your life as an overgrown teenager until the very end, just don't 'believe' the marketing, spend big to reproduce or die 'er' 'um' forgotten (like so what and like it wont happen anyhow), no support from children (like they will even be able to afford it, no full time employment, no home ownership) or the happiness of your children (watching them die in for profit wars, see them bankrupted by health care costs and most likely living a life of poverty). Billion of years of past and billions of years of future, either life is worth more than a mud monkey experience (serving the greed of those more anti-social than your are) or why play the fucking game.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
As a father of 2 kids, I've performed my evolutionary duty. :-) However, there are plenty of younger people in the US who aren't, and in my opinion they're being somewhat rational. Having kids is a big risk unless you just don't give a crap -- they cost a lot of money and you have to be much more careful about maintaining your income and savings than if you were on your own. Millenials are also skipping traditional adult rites of passage like marriage, house-buying, etc. that lay the groundwork for a family. Plus, those that do have kids are having fewer, later. Generally, people are less religious, have heard of birth control, and are less worried about child mortality, therefore less inclined to have "spare" children.
Japan has a few things that are really slowing their birthrate - almost zero permanent immigration, a very slow economy for the last 20 years, a traditional society that says women can have either children or a career but not both, and a reputation for a workaholic culture. People are just so busy spending their lives at work so they can keep their jobs that having a family comes second. This is a big reversal from the 1980s/1990s...I remember growing up hearing that Japan was taking over the world. MBA programs were toying with the idea of making Japanese language study a requirement if I remember correctly. This is similar to what China is doing now, but China has the population to sustain it in my opinion.
We in the US could be headed down this road too. Imagine if we close the borders and enter a period of economic stagnation. Couple this with the trend towards unstable employment, the gig economy, etc. Back in the 50s/60s, a man could count on being employed for life by a large US company and would take on the risk of a family, kids, house, car, etc. Now (IMO) we've let the pendulum swing too far back in favor of employers and removed any loyalty/stability either side had to the other. Hopefully people will realize that they want stability again once this Second Dotcom Bubble bursts and takes many of the sharing economy employers with it.
Have you seen Tokyo's population? That city could definitely use a decrease. Who the fuck wants to live in such close proximity to that many people?
I found it more tolerable to live close t that many people than to live close to any other people, including my own. The Japanese nature is ideally suited to living in close quarters. Even though it's not overall a crowded country - it's all small villages and unpopulated wilderness when you go out of town - they enjoy living close to each other.
That's because Japanese culture, in general, understands manners and social graces. Things Americans wouldn't think twice about are major faux pas in Japanese society.
Americans seem to think that if they are kind to a stranger, if they yield, if they voluntarily allow someone else to be first ... if they say "excuse me" and actually give the other person a second to move instead of immediately invading their personal space like it was not a polite request but a warning ... if they decide that blocking high-traffic doorways, hallways and other narrow shared public spaces might be rude ... if they show any sort of respect to another person especially one they don't know, who is not their boss in any way ... well then they lose at least ten points.
Americans don't think of these things as common courtesy - that was a generation or two ago. Now, Americans think of these things as acts of subservience, a tacit admission that someone else is better than you. They have confused self-centeredness with individuality. So they think that "who will take your shit without serious challenge" is the real measure of self-hood and significance. Ask any American who has ever worked a job in retail. So it's no wonder that Japanese are better at living closely together with less (though certainly not zero) stress overall.
The real issue with Americans is they're generally so very provincial. They tend not to have personally experienced foreign cultures and don't think much about multiple ways to do things. This is a major flaw because the whole American Melting Pot concept is based on conscious awareness, not mindless obedience from lack of other known options. Plenty of cultures other than the Japanese can highlight this, it's just that this one was on-topic.
If you want to have a replacement rate of 2.3 children per woman some women will need to have at least 3 kids. I'm lucky, my ex and I had excellent educations and very good jobs. However in Canada having more than 2 kids is in many ways an exception and there are lots of little things that are surprisingly biased against families larger than 4. I've seen in some cities that are more dog friendly than kid friendly and when they do have facilities or policies for small children it is for one child. So if most western countries require a woman to start a career before having children then the number of women having them will go down, if women are discourage from having their first child until after 30 it gets worse and if you make it difficult or almost weird for women to have more than 1 or 2 children then it's pretty much mathematically impossible to maintain a population without large amounts of immigration.
Also at some point our health care system started spending the majority of its money on people in their last 18 months of life. There are a lot of other wealth transfers from the young to older generations, house prices, government debt... There is likely some tipping point were the share of the economy that is given to 18 - 30 year olds becomes so small that they don't feel secure enough to start a family. My suspicion is that most western countries crossed that point a while ago.
While there's definitely some truth to this, a large part of it is also that Japanese tend to be much passive aggressive. So, the whole subway groping phenomenon is so pervasive that basically nothing is done about it. And those who want to raise awareness? They use kawai imagery because even anti-groping messages have to be cube.
Talk about pot calling the kettle black. Japan is massive provincial, xenophobic, sexist, and generally peaceful based upon a system of mindless obedience. The American Melting Pot concept is not base on conscious awareness as much as constant exposure which happens in cities but not most of rural America. This does not translate into wholly self-centeredness but there's definitely a lot more of it and more awareness of it in American tourists--consider how few Americans leave the country and see how much that creates a huge bias.
In any case, the Japanese crave cities like a lot of people crave cities: it's the best place to have a sustainable career with a substantial income. It's why the East/West coasts in the US have so many people. The main difference is that in the US the vast majority of the rest of the space is wide, open space. In Japan, it's mountains. It's little wonder a greater percentage might cluster around cities that have been heavily leveled/terraced. The other major point, of course, is having 125 million people in so small a space,
regardless.
You spend your entire school life studying your ass off. You aren't supposed to do much outside of school except study. Having a relationship is discouraged to the extreme.
Then you get a job where you work 12 to 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. You have no time to actually meet someone so the odds of having a relationship are slim. Added bonus. Your boss will treat you like shit. Everything you do will be criticized. I guess it's some mistaken belief that you'll work even harder.
On the unlikely event you find and marry someone at work, she has to quit her job and have babies. You get to keep working 12 to 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. So if, by some miracle, you have children, you'll never see them.
No wonder young people are rejecting the entire social system and hiding from the world or committing suicide.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Oh for fucks sake, quit it with this nonsense. This whole "exploitation of the majority for the minority" fits any form of government. Do you think the common man lived any better under the various feudal systems that predate the modern capitalist economies? The same holds true for all of the communist systems that were tried as well, with huge disparities between the proles and the party leadership, with the only difference being that everyone was poorer. At least in western capitalist countries there's some form of social mobility where a poor immigrant like Andrew Carnegie can become wealthy and powerful. Medieval peasants didn't go around becoming lords unless they found a sword in stone.
People are having fewer children because we're so productive and good at keeping them alive, there isn't as much incentive to spawn half a dozen or more for extra farm labor. Household productivity is likewise vastly improved to the point where women can work part or full time outside of the house without the household falling into complete disarray so most of them don't want to sit around being a baby factory either. And its a good thing as well. The world doesn't need even more people when we haven't figured out how to make sure that the ones we have are all at a reasonable baseline and not committing various atrocities towards one and other.
Oh for fucks sake, quit it with this nonsense. This whole "exploitation of the majority for the minority" fits any form of government. Do you think the common man lived any better under the various feudal systems that predate the modern capitalist economies?
No, but that's no reason to "quit it" with what you call "this nonsense". The simple fact is that constant vigilance is the price of freedom precisely because human nature has not changed. Things are much better for the average person today than it was then, but the way we are living now (as a species) is unsustainable and is destroying our habitat. We can't just rest on our laurels because things are better today than they were during the dark ages.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"