Japan Lost 3M People in Five Years(nytimes.com) |
Japan Lost 3M People in Five Years(nytimes.com) |
There are problems that arise from a population that contains a lot of old people, but that's a problem that fixes itself in a few decades, and balance will be restored.
Pick one crisis: no jobs, or no people.
It is not really a problem for the regular working class citizen, and historically population drops have improved wages and labor rights. See things like the black plague or wars with large casualties, which resulted in significant population drops which gives more power and leverage to the labor class.
Keep insisting on Draconian hours for unlivable pay, and you get what you asked for.
* Falling population is a political problem, not a social one. It also feels like this is the system working as intended from the higher ups.
[South Korea has a high birth rate for religious groups than non-religious](https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol44/23/44-23....) no religion, 1.13; Buddhist, 1.33; Catholic, 1.16; Protestant, 1.28; and “other religion,” 1.20. This is the same country with the same problems for all groups.
Or accept (mass) immigration, which LBH only black and brown countries have excess bodies. Countries will have to decide whether they hate slow decline more than they hate getting darker or hate their women's rights. Or maybe on long timeline, some scifi shenanigans like test tube babies, shifting sex ratio, i.e. 2:1 female to male ratio brings replacement TFR to 1.5 and all the family structure changes that entails (more single moms, institutional polygamy, functional state orphanages etc), i.e. state will have to be much more active in demographic management.
Ultimately, it seems cannot carrot to replacement TFR, maybe able to stick, but no politician in any system really wants to touch that stick.
We need to normalize working part-time for couples, even for professional jobs, even going so far as to make it a cultural non-negotiable. And/or compensate for the lost income.
Without the cultural shift, it turns into a prisoner's dilemma. When both partners fight through the exhaustion and work full-time while also raising children, they can outbid everyone else for houses, schools, and cars.
> Keep insisting on Draconian hours for unlivable pay
Average hours worked in Japan are comparable to the UK and significantly lower than the US, Canada, Czechia, and Israel [0], yet they all have significantly higher birth rates than Japan.
The issue in Japan and Asia in general is cultural. Women are still expected to both hold a career and do all household chores and have 2 kids. In a lot of cases, jobs will de facto fire women if they have kids because of the cultural expectation that they will leave to have kids and become a housewife.
Unsurprisingly, plenty of Japanese women have decided they don't want that life and have decided against marriage. On the other side of the coin, plenty of Japanese women hold off on marriage until they find a partner who can afford to be a primary earner. Unsurprisingly, this means higher educated households in Japan tend to have a higher birth rate than less educated ones [1] as they tend to be more economically stable.
The only developed country which has an above replacement TFR is Israel (even non-religious secular Israelis have a replacement TFR), and it's culturally one of the most pro-children societies I've ever been and much more gender egalitarian than other countries.
All conversations about TFR and birth rates on HN are from a male point of view and never actually as why women don't want kids or maybe don't want to date a number of HNers/Redditors. It's very incel-like in nature.
[0] - https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html
[1] - https://weekly-economist.mainichi.jp/articles/20250916/se1/0...
How trustworthy is that data? It claims to count only employed people, but for Japan it works out to 6.2 hours work per day, 5 days a week. Yet we all hear stories of workers in Japan having basically no life outside of work. And when people visit Japan, they report things like everything being spotless, and trash containers and trucks being washed daily - labor intensive things. Something doesn't add up.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-born-per-woman?t...
I think europe seems to be pretty balanced. Friends take 5 week vacation in the summer.
A lot of the policy conversation and worries about an aging Japan began all the way back in the 1960s and 1970s, and helped inform the Flying Geese paradigm Japan has leveraged.
Personally, I've noticed American newspapers using Japan the same way they would use the Nordics a decade ago - as an idealized image that was leveraged for domestic ideological battles.
(I'm making fun of the weird phrasing of the headline. It's obviously a serious issue for the nation of Japan).
This is categorically not true. The decreased labor cost makes the new norm that both of them have to work full time.
Very. This is the OECD.
> Yet we all hear stories of workers in Japan having basically no life outside of work
These anecdotes tend to be decades old. After the labor code changes in 2018; the new generation of Japanese megacorps like SoftBank, Rakuten, Mercari, and LY normalizing Western work culture; and the worker shortage in the 2010s, work hours reduced.
> And when people visit Japan, they report things like everything being spotless, and trash containers and trucks being washed daily
This is done by guest workers brought in from ASEAN, China, and Nepal in exploitative Gulf-style labor programs that are de facto bonded labor and at least back in Vietnam have ties with organized crime.
The Japanese Ministry of Labor literally has a formal strategy around recruiting guestworkers for janatorial and cleaning work [0].
This is also why the new government is cracking down on such kinds of abuses [1].
Japan has only 3.3% immigrants. For comparison, Canada has 23%.
Look, it may feel shocking to you as a Brit, but yes Japanese work life has become significantly chiller and QoL is better than the UK. They didn't have 15 years of austerity as well as Brexit, and were largely sheltered from the Great Recession and Eurozone crisis due to their trade ties in Asia and North America.
They also invested heavily in automation which meant less hands needed for menial work as well as disinvesting in rural and low population regions (most comments about cleanliness tend to be centered within the richer areas of Tokyo).
[0] - https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/11130500/001567071.pdf
[1] - https://mainichi.jp/articles/20251121/k00/00m/040/139000c
[2] - https://mainichi.jp/articles/20251121/k00/00m/040/125000c
[3] - https://mainichi.jp/articles/20251121/k00/00m/040/132000c
[4] - https://www.meti.go.jp/shingikai/sankoshin/seizo_sangyo/text...
I would love to see an example of a country where couples with children can each work 50% time but get paid like both are working full-time. Unrealistic, yes. But also arguably fair.