No. of primary, middle school students in Japan down 1 mil. in decade

6 comments

1. It’s really only going to get worse. My ex watched his small town start to disappear off the map and now his elementary school and middle school are factories. In my ten years here saw the population go from an already tiny 6,000 to a now 2,000.

   Japan is getting hit first with this, but most other developed nations aren’t far behind.

2. This is Thomas Picketty’s “Capitalism”, where the capital owner’s profit growth exceeds the growth of productivity. This means that even when the size of the total economy grows, the workers’ share shrinks, and the capital owners’ shares grows even faster than the economy grows. It’s a kind of economic genocide.

   For the wealthy, this is a feature, not a bug. The labor force can be replaced by foreign labor, by software, and, ideally, by wholly-owned robot labor.

   The working poor might be able to fight back through politics, but—well, they are outmatched—so, no.

3. Even over the time I’ve been here I’ve watched the group of schoolkids that leave our apartment complex every morning dwindle to like 5 kids and the children’s festival the apartment would throw each year has been cancelled due to lack of kids.

4. I wish the article had gone more into why people aren’t having as many kids, and what the government is doing (not doing) about it. Instead, the author just presented the numbers.

   I talked with teachers in Japan about this 20 years ago. Even then, the number of immigrants needed to maintain the workforce would have been huge and totally unacceptable to many Japanese citizens. Today? Forget trying to maintain population or workforce with immigration.

5. Sad to see, but all signs pointed to this happening decades ago.

   Living in Tokyo (and I imagine the other major cities), it doesn’t seem to be doom and gloom and people are having kids…

   It would be interesting to see a new map or a projection of Japan where entire prefectures might have to merge with others, and rural folk come living closer and closer to the cities.

6. One after another, developed countries are going to outlaw abortion, and even birth control.