What does the population problem mean for you? Other than the “standard government bandaids”, what kinds of things do you think would help the issue?
To me, at least part of the solution is to radically change public perception of mental health. I have experience in the salary man world and it is soul-crushing. It seems like when you give your all to a company and suppress any regard for your own well-being, there’s little left in the tank for family.
It also seems like the policy changes Kishida wants to make won’t do anything to really move the needle. I don’t know enough about the effectiveness of public policy here but in the case where what they plan to do doesn’t move the needle enough, how desperate do you foresee the government getting?
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My personal preference would be for the government to do nothing. Japan is roughly the size of California but has more than double the population. Fewer people is a good thing in the long-term, IMO. Not that there won’t be problems on the way, but honestly the country seems to be dealing with it OK so far. My hope is that with fewer people, those that remain will be valued more, which will improve conditions so people start feeling they have the wherewithal to have more kids. Maybe I’m naive but that’s how I see it.
Well considering womens rights here are decades behind… Maybe talk to the young Japanese women around and you’ll see.
Lacking maternity leave, shit childcare system, patriarchal sexist society…
Higher wages, better work/life balance, the dispersing of jobs outside of just Tokyo and Osaka.
Most people I know who has 2+ kids usually have grandparents relatively closeby.
This isn’t just a Japan problem. Declining birthrates are a thing all over the world. There just aren’t enough societal benefits to having children for most people. Raising kids is a tough job and expensive, and the rewards, while many, (I’m a dad, btw) just aren’t enough for many, many people, especially when you start talking about having a larger family.
So what can any government do about that? Sure they can offer financial incentives, but really society’s views of family and having children would have to start to shift. We aren’t all living on farms nowadays or owning family businesses, so what’s the benefit to having 3 or more kids? Unless there are some, few people are going to want to go down that big family road.
When women are better educated, they get married later, when they get married later, they have less children. In Japan, the average age of marriage is above 29 years old. Not going to have 3 kids if you start when you’re 30 years old. Before WW2, Japanese women averaged 10 pregnancies (some didn’t survive birth). South Korea, Italy and many other countries face similar trends. US population growth is due immigration and higher birth rates among immigrants. Look at countries where the population is booming: Nigeria, Bangladesh, Indonesia, etc. Women have low education rates and average marriage age is 18 and below. Without sustained immigration, the population in Japan will continue to shrink.
My 2 yennies, reduce the individual tax on revenue, subsidize a lot and there you go, a jump in birth rate
Honestly, when we as women have choices we reproduce less anywhere in the world. I say if that’s the case then let it be.
Poverty and soul crushing jobs didn’t deter my grandparents from having my parents, uncles and aunts and then send them to night high school to earn their own living and pay for their own education because they didn’t think having less children than they did was a choice. My parents’ generation in turn had less children than my grandparents to send them at least to high school, then our generation to college, all to have choices.
We all worked to have a choice and a say in our own life, and less children was the result of it. I don’t think it’s a bad thing.
People need physical space, time, and excess resources to want kids.
So make housing with more space, lower cost of living/raise wages, give better paternity/maternity time of, reduce working hours, and provide good healthcare which is affordable.
I agree broadly with Kohei Saito’s writings on the ecological necessity of degrowth and the need for a radical restructuring of society in order to achieve that. Japan has an opportunity to show global leadership in this regard.
Maybe if people in the community, society in general, the government, and the company you work for aren’t against you having kids, then fucking maybe we can get the birth rate up high.
Fuck this country for being inflexible with everything.
Fuck the other women who see pregnant women as a “rival” when they too want to have kids but couldn’t because the fucking company thinks “women should take turns” when getting pregnant. Fucking wow lmfao
Fuck society for wanting women to pop out babies but get annoyed when kids are in strollers and taking up space in trains/playing in the park and some old geezer complains about the noise.
Fuck the government for not raising the salaries of the nursery teachers.
Fuck the companies for not supporting their pregnant female workers and thinking they’re a burden.
People need to stop believing the government claims of societal collapse and realize Japan is part of the same planet as all other countries and that without a worldwide population reduction we are all screwed.
The problem has less to do with policy/mental health than it has to do with how people value their time.
In every country in the developed world birth rates have dropped. While Japan gets a lot of press because their population is shrinking Japan is not an outlier in terms of it’s birth rate – it’s not even the lowest in the world.
The difference is due to the difficulty in assimilating here as a migrant (this is not the visa/immigration process, Japan is one of the easiest countries to get a work visa for in the world, all you need is a bachelors degree and a job offer). Other countries are propping up their populations by immigration because they are easier to assimilate into for migrants and their children.
So why is this? Because of the incrimental cost of children.
People who are poor (or from poorer countries) have a very low incrimental cost for children, it costs them essentially nothing, in some cases it gains them something in terms of labor to help procure food/other resources/is an investment for when they grow older to have someone to take care of them.
People who are rich see having more children as a status symbol. They have the wealth to maintain their status with many offspring.
People who are middle class have vast options in terms of inexpensive travel and entertainment. They have a difficult choice to make though. One child doesn’t cost much. Two is a bigger cost, and that’s breaking even. Three children – what you need for a growing population – is a HUGE cost in terms of what you either spend or give up for travel/vacations/school/etc..
I’m in the upper middle class and among my peer group I am a rare rare person with 3 children. A surprisingly high number of my peers have 0 children. They have activities/travel/etc. and children would be to big a burden on them. Most of my peers have 1 child. Some have 2. I’m a rarity with 3. I can think of 1 with more than 3 but he had 2 sets of twins in a row and the 2nd set wasn’t “planned” they were born 10 months after the 1st set (so before they’d taken the appropriate steps to make that permanently impossible – so he got a basketball team).
I wonder more for my son. By the time he gets to working age, what will the opportunities be like? What will the public services be like and his eventual retirement? He can live in the US or Japan. He can do what he wants, but it makes you wonder.
For me and my wife, we will likely split our time in the US/JP in our earlier retirement years. In later retirement, I don’t know – hope the health system holds up because there’s gonna be a whole lotta old around here.
IMHO, there isn’t a lot the government can do now. They need to keep trying, but they’ve lost the demographic battle. I’ve been here on and off for 25 years and they had chances to address this earlier but hesitated.
The only way at this point would be to go Canada or Portugal on the immigration policy which I think is unlikely.
>To me, at least part of the solution is to radically change public perception of mental health. I have experience in the salary man world and it is soul-crushing.
Personally, I’d like the work situation fixed before workers get pushed to the point they need mental health support.
I know far too many Japanese people who have children and basically live at work and never see those children. They *choose* to live like that. Work becomes an escape for the labor (emotional and regular) of helping a little child become a person. Except the escape has the knock-on effect of increasing pressure on everyone else to stay at work, until it’s a vicious cycle.
It’s a problem that has to be solved, but is never going to be solved as long as the LDP is fixated on increasing births over increasing people *living their lives.*
It’ll take 1-2 generations to break to change the culture. The government can make recommendations or change policies, but it cannot change the work culture with policies. Just look at masks. Vast majority of japanese people still continue to wear masks even when the government said its okay not to. Same can be said with the long working hours. The government can recommend to stop the long working hours, but doesn’t mean the people will listen.
I say it’ll take a generation or two to phase out the older people who adhere to these long working hours and wait for the newer generations to be in charge.
What problem, exactly? There are issues, of course, but which ones are worrying you?
I’m happy to see the world population starting to level off, maybe possibly. Continued growth was and is not sustainable.
I expect the current administration to do almost nothing effective.
As a woman, I think as opting out of parenthood becomes a more socially acceptable choice, logically less people around the developed world will voluntarily choose it. In the past I think more people married and started families not because it was what they really wanted to do in life, but due to social pressures and lack of education and options for social and economic stability. Now we have so many choices and there’s no one way to live your life.
What’s needed is support systems so if the husband bails on the wife, she is t all alone trying to raise a child in Japan. With pressure off, women may feel more secure in bringing life in to the world. But I’m not a woman, and I do not claim to speak for them in any way.
Japan doesn’t need to worry about a stagnating population, they need to worry about a stagnating economy and lackluster economic and technological advancement in comparison to other nations. They keep blaming it on their citizens but don’t do anything to protect the middle class.
Given how much automation and AI will be taking over in the coming decade, unless there’s a huge corporate taxes hike that’s redistributed to the population (aren’t I a funny guy?), the fact there are fewer people might be a good thing.
As I see it, it comes down to 2 issues.
The first is that people must be encouraged to see a baby as an asset, not just a liability. Currently the thought among the young population (and this is in no way constrained to Japan), is that a baby is either a “worst case scenario” (and they use contraception like their life depends on it), or “something middle aged people think about”.
The second is freeing people up time & obligations wise from other things, especially the workplace (which would need to include a competition-driven shift towards work-life balance companies).
It is completely false that this is a money issue (statistics on country wealth vs birth rates make that crystal clear). But it can be a time issue.
That would probably be sufficient to get back to a replacement level birth rate, and it’s worth remembering that Japan is by no means the worst case in the region.
I don’t think the problem is that the population is declining. I think the problem is that the proportion of workers is small because those who were born during the period of rapid population growth are now elderly.
Support for those who want to have children is important, but I don’t think it is necessary to focus on the number of births.
In the past, people felt obligated to get married and have children. Now, women can choose not to get married and not to have children. I don’t think this is a bad thing.
My personal opinion is that we should accept refugees who are persecuted in their home countries, give them some education here, and let them become citizens here.
It’s probably due to lack of love life and marriage. Married couples are more likely to have kids even if a financial change for them. Most people don’t want to have kids single.
Find out why Japanese people (and developed nations people) in general aren’t marrying and then you can increase the birth rate.
People who want to have children need more support. That’s pretty much the be-all and end-all of the answer. We need more media of families, good families. We need women to be comfortable and not have to fear being trapped with horrible husbands or families because of becoming pregnant. We need women to be able to be working mothers, too, because a lot of families simply can’t afford to have only one working parent, and there are quite a few people who don’t have parents located close enough to take care of their children while they are at work. And some of those grandparents couldn’t do it anyway because they have to work.
I don’t think an aging and shrinking population will be as problematic as a lot of people think.
I really believe that with the direction we are heading in terms of automation, AI, and robotics we will quickly have vastly different economic, environmental, and social problems.
Not calling it what it really is: rapid population aging. It is self correcting problem in long run, but in short run 2-3 generations it usually leads to breaking down societies.
IMO it’s rhetoric or an excuse to say have more kids to keep things the way they are and it’s based off an outdated economic model like the politicians and businesses here.
Honestly a shrinking population will be good, there will be problems, but it’s problems that will effect the elderly, big businesses and politicians and why they scream at the younger generation to pop out more kids.
A declining and shrinking population means more space, more food, better student to teacher ratio, and more money, energy, and attention put into children as parents have one or two to take care of instead of 4 or 5 kids.
It’s not a doom and gloom like media makes it out, population decline will not wipe or ruin Japan, it will mean they have to adapt and change which Japanese politicians, elderly and businesses here hate to do. Further humans throughout history have had population declines for all kinds of reasons war, disease, famine, etc and still continue on afterwards, Japan will still be here just not as many people.
I heard that reducing income tax rate per birth for mothers and fathers worked well to partially reverse the drop in birth rate in Hungary, other than that, immigration like other developed economies.
My impression is that the root of this issue is a cultural problem. Married women already have children—their husbands. Being expected to work, take care of the house, then adding taking care of a child to this list doesn’t seem appealing to many women. Who can blame them? Yes, attitudes are changing, but they are changing very slowly, and many women still feel the old expectations. To me it seems like no matter how many incentives, programs, etc. the government comes up with, things will not change until husbands become equal partners in the home.
Read up on the French approach — in summary make career compatible with children, by taking care of women both legally (gender equality) as well as practically (daycare, healthcare). Oh and the tax is progressive, but first the family income is divided by family size, so having children actually pays for a wide band in the society.
In the short term though, if the govt was serious about it, there would be a program to allow, let’s say, 20M “nice” foreigners (let’s say Vietnamese) to settle over 20 years.
Instead, what you have is series of governments that are happy to manage what they call a looming disaster, try to build casinos, but rather little in terms of real change in the society.
I might be brainwashed from having this issue brought to my attention a lot, but I think one of the major drawbacks is the lack of youth culture. Things seem stagnant already to me and stand to get more so.
Around where I reside in Tokyo, Arakawa-ku, Kita-ku, Itabashi-ku, Adachi-ku, if you take a bus through them or walk around it’s very grey and depressing. You’ll see old people everywhere. So that’s a concern, as things develop it will only get more so.
I guess someone will need to figure out what to do with the pension/tax issue but I don’t really know what the solution is. I’m certain there’ll be more and more immigrants arriving here in the future, like it or not. The number of this has already doubled since I moved here. Most women will HAVE TO work, the housewife option will only be for the well-off. We are already nearly there now, and this will continue over the next few years. But women’s rights will improve and I think with more immigration there.might be more and more tolerance.
I’m not sure that the government are really serious about reversing the trend, or if they believe it’s a solvable problem. It might just be that they want to justify the increase in cost of living by giving me 5,000 yen extra per kid per month.
Something that is becoming increasingly clear to me is that it is very likely that our lives will all be very different in 30 years and the population issue will be part of this, worldwide. Wherever people can get away from the pressure to have kids, fewer actually want to. It’s not going to change now, not for a while.
For my kids, I’m actually quite optimistic. If there are so few kids being born now then as long as the country isnt completely eaten up by these upcoming problems, then I think they should have a decent life. Less competition, more freedom and so on.
Not much personally.
The problem is part of a global trend, but also indicates a disconnect between economic thinking and economic reality.
1. The current governments measures will bring along a tide of measures that very much targeted to those who have families already, are already married, or are in social-economic positions that have a high chance of being married in their 20s-30s. This means all of this is generally aimed at about 40% or the population or less. (high teens to early 40s is about 45% of the population).
1. 40% of wage earners earn over 600man.
2. Considering the costs of raising children until ~21, married high earners in an ideal age range are likely to be the most benefiting from these policies. This maybe less than 15% of the population.
2. There are no new measures to support the “creation” of new mothers. Especially in the ideal maternal range (late 20s early 30s), if the high earners portion (over 600m) remains relatively unchanged, the marriage market and newborns will probably also continue to be restricted.
1. Consequently in future years the population measures will be a tax burden for the whole JPN population, but be directly beneficial to only a certain 40~30% of the population.
3. Economic thinking has changed in history to match or align with particular challenges in reality. Whether it be mass production for war or production advances with IT, adjustments to output to reduce environmental impacts, etc. Current economic thinking still thinks of things in a endless growth way, and more so that human resources (homies) are much more than merely gears in the machine. When economics takes the problem much like these previous issues (how do we help mankind have more families literally), major change may finally come around.
Given the experience many of my coworkers have faced, one of the biggest things the government can do would be to massively expand their nursery school programs.
A giant backlog of people wanting to get into nursery schools guarantees that it wouldn’t be a waste of resources, and it would help to alleviate concerns about the impact on your career that having kids would have.