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Japan's 18-year-olds at record-low 1.06 million on falling births (www.japantimes.co.jp)

submitted 10 months ago by boem@lemmy.world to c/world@lemmy.world

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[-] AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 124 points 10 months ago

Japan’s problems are compounded by its ethnocentric concept of nationhood, where it is almost impossible for people who aren’t of ethnic Japanese descent to become citizens. There are third-generation descendants of Korean immigrants in Japan who have never lived in Korea, speak only Japanese and have only ever known Japanese culture, but who can never be legally Japanese.

[-] pthaloblue@sh.itjust.works 32 points 10 months ago

I hate these birth rate panic articles. If they gave citizenship to the people who are doing the hard work (like 3K jobs) it wouldn't be a problem.

[-] scarabic@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

Can you explain how the citizenship issue relates to the demographic problem? Are those people shut out of citizenship not having as many children? I’m a little unclear if you are even saying that it’s connected, or just saying that it’s one more problem Japan also has.

[-] tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 1 points 10 months ago

It's definitely an involved process to naturalize as Japanese, but it mostly requires that you have a method for supporting yourself financially and that all your taxes are paid. Japan doesn't allow dual citizenship though, which is why most people just get permanent residency instead. There aren't many differences between PR and citizenship, except the ability to vote.

[-] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 92 points 10 months ago

People being worked to death with high cost of living. No time for families, no money to have kids. Capitalism is crushing itself to death.

[-] jaschen@lemmynsfw.com 66 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Visited Japan(Osaka) recently with my 5 year old son. While there is infrastructure setup for people with kids such as stroller only elevators, kids/elder section on the train, nobody, I mean, nobody followed the rules. Regularly the stroller only elevators were full and nobody got out. Or able body adults didn't even glance up to let my sleepy child sit in the kids designated seats.

There were glares at us when my son was having a hard time, almost like we were inconveniencing them.

In my week-long experience there, people in general are not tolerated for children. No wonder nobody wants kids. I wouldn't want to if I was treated that way.

[-] highenergyphysics@lemmy.world 34 points 10 months ago

Turns out conservatives were the moral hazard to society this whole time.

To nobody’s surprise.

[-] Volidon@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Interesting, just came back from Japan and had a completely opposite experience.

[-] jaschen@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 10 months ago

Which part? Maybe I'll visit there next time.

Also, I'm coming from Taiwan which is very VERY friendly to kids and families. So I guess I was expecting a similar experience.

[-] Volidon@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto. The majority of folks moved as needed and we did the same.

[-] flatpandisk@lemm.ee 2 points 10 months ago

So sounds like hard pass for folks with kiddos?

[-] jaschen@lemmynsfw.com 4 points 10 months ago

Don't get me wrong Mario land was great. But just weird shit drove us mad even inside a family friendly place like Universal Studios.

We had a friend with us that had a 3 year old girl with them. The airline lost their stroller(this was an major ordeal, nobody spoke English at the airports there)so they decided to rent from Universal Studio instead.

First of all, the person who was attending the stroller section didn't speak a lick of English. Fine. Whatever. We used Google translate. He asked us how old the girl was and I said 3 years old.

The next question was
"Is it her birthday? "...

Us: ummmm, no. That was a month ago.

They immediately said: "No rent to you. "

Wtf dude. Why?!?! Because the rules are 3 years old or younger. That means less than 36 months, not less than 48 months.

Just random shit like that seems the norm for the Japanese.

[-] flatpandisk@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago

Thanks for the clarification. Sorry your trip was so rough. I may hold off going then with the new info.

[-] afraidofmybasement@lemmy.ca 2 points 10 months ago

As a counter point, I had a great time in Osaka with my young daughter this summer. I'm not saying the previous poster was wrong, just that my experience was apparently very different.

[-] flatpandisk@lemm.ee 2 points 10 months ago

Thanks for the feedback. I know my kiddos will want to visit Tokyo but as we all know sometimes kiddos don’t act proper 100% of the time :)

If we go first time we’ll be non central or South American. There everyone welcomes kiddos so trying to make sure I don't get a culture shock when visiting Japan.

[-] afraidofmybasement@lemmy.ca 1 points 10 months ago

No kids are perfectly behaved. We had a great time all over the Asian countries we visited, more accommodating than North America in some ways.

You will definitely get culture shock when visiting Japan if you're never been to Asia though, just for many others reasons.

[-] SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 39 points 10 months ago

Half of all countries are below replacement rate. Japan's fertility rate isn't even the lowest.

[-] Haagel@lemmings.world 10 points 10 months ago

If I recall correctly, only the Phillipines, China, and a few African countries are actually projected to grow

[-] Syntha@sh.itjust.works 27 points 10 months ago

China is already shrinking

[-] jaschen@lemm.ee 11 points 10 months ago

Taiwan is not part of China.

[-] Graphy@lemmy.world 34 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Is less people really such a bad thing? We’re at a point where everyone’s already complaining about housing and climate change.

We can blame the 1% and we can say the elderly will suffer but something’s gotta give. I feel we’re all buying into a pyramid scheme.

[-] ahnesampo@sopuli.xyz 37 points 10 months ago

It’s not fewer people that’s the problem, but fewer people too fast. A society needs labor to provide the goods and services people need. If the share of people who do labor (working age) to people who don’t (children and the elderly) becomes too lopsided, the burden on those who work becomes unsustainable. (The Boomers had the opposite: they had a smaller older generation and didn’t have many children, so during their prime years the working age population was much larger than dependants on both ends of the age pyramid. That’s part of the reason why they were so prosperous.)

Going by total fertility rate (children per woman):

2.1 is enough for replacement. No problems.
1.8 means every generation is 10 % smaller than the previous. We can deal with that.
1.5 means every generation is 25 % smaller than the previous. This starts to cause problems.
1.0 means generation size halves every generation. This is not sustainable.
0.8 RIP South Korea

[-] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 20 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

If the share of people who do labor (working age) to people who don’t (children and the elderly) becomes too lopsided, the burden on those who work becomes unsustainable.

Except that raising children requires more time and resources than caring for elderly. So having less children frees up more resources to care for the elderly. Into the next generation there are now less people which require even less resources which means you need fewer workers to produce those resources.

History provides evidence for this. After every major war there were economic booms. This is despite wars killing off the able bodied workers leaving only the sick and elderly.

The only people who suffer from a lower population are the ownership class. They live by skimming a little of the productivity off of every worker.

[-] droog_the_droog@lemmy.world 17 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Except that raising children requires more time and resources than caring for elderly.

Source on this? Doesn't sound right at all. According to my findings after a quick search, LTC (long-term care) takes a significantly higher fraction of OECD countries GDP than e.g. childcare+early education.

https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/PF3_1_Public_spending_on_childcare_and_early_education.pdf

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/cb584fa2-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/cb584fa2-en

[-] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

I'll dig up more sources but you compared public spending on childcare (which is minimal in the US) to private long term care costs.

The average cost to raise a child to age 18 is $310,000.

https://www.investopedia.com/how-much-to-save-for-college-4782579

[-] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 6 points 10 months ago

The average cost to raise a child to age 18 is $310,000.

How many days of intensive care is that? The resources we spend trying to keep dying elderly people around just a little bit longer are insane.

[-] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago

How many days of intensive care is that?

End of life care averages $80,000

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-193X(22)00176-4/fulltext

[-] Neato@ttrpg.network 4 points 10 months ago

After every major war there were economic booms.

Need citation for this. War is a net negative every time. War destroys resources and kills people. This leads to a labor shortage. It also destroys property so it leads to housing crisis and famine.

Except that raising children requires more time and resources than caring for elderly. So having less children frees up more resources to care for the elderly. Into the next generation there are now less people which require even less resources which means you need fewer workers to produce those resources.

That is a death spiral. You can consider the labor involved with caring for the elderly a sort of tax on labor. It's a net drain but required and is directly related to previous generations of labor. The labor involved with raising children is similar but is closer to an investment. The more labor done for raising children, the more labor there will be next generation. Even though the labor for children is higher than the labor for the elderly, it results in a net positive.

If you have vastly fewer children in the following generation, you end up with a higher percentage of elderly labor compared to the labor pool. If the labor for children goes down enough to more than make up for it, you don't have a per capita labor deficit. BUT you do have less total labor.

Now we get into the real issue: maintaining society. It isn't just about the labor to care for each other. But technology, infrastructure, food, etc all need a certain amount of labor. And most of these tasks are scalable so it requires less labor per capita as population increases. If you shrink your labor pool too quickly, you won't be able to sustain your infrastructure causing a collapse.

[-] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Need citation for this.

Napoleonic Wars, WW1, WW2. Not even including the US, Russia, China and Japan all had explosive growth after WW2.

War is a net negative every time.

If a sudden drop in working age labor causes a death spiral, then Russia would have had a death spiral after WW2. Instead they had a boom and put a man in space before the US.

The labor involved with raising children is similar but is closer to an investment.

It's not an investment because at the end of a child's growth, you now have a consumer who requires more resources. When an elderly dies, that frees up resources for everyone.

The Black Plague is a accepted factor for the Renaissance. Labor became more valuable. The death of so many workers allowed the surviving workers wages to increase and they got more independence. It wasn't a death spiral.

BUT you do have less total labor.

Total less labor isn't a problem when you don't need more labor.

If you shrink your labor pool too quickly, you won’t be able to sustain your infrastructure causing a collapse.

WW2 was a far quicker and far more severe labor pool shrinkage for many countries in the world. There was no collapse.

[-] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 3 points 10 months ago

It's not an investment because at the end of a child's growth, you now have a consumer who requires more resources.

You realize working people produce more resources than they consume, right? If they didn't, there would be no economy at all.

[-] tacosanonymous@lemm.ee 4 points 10 months ago

I think that’s slippery slope or presumptive, at best. Birth rates shift and flow and there will always be people that have kids.

I have more respect for people that see the trend and don’t want to create wage slaves.

If governments addressed real issues instead of maximizing corporate interests, they might create a stable birth rate.

[-] SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 17 points 10 months ago

It is a pyramid scheme. We have an economic system based on continuous growth. When it doesn't grow, it's a huge panic, such as during the pandemic or 2008 economic crisis. Now the number of workers and consumers, the base of the whole system, is starting to shrink and nothing much van be done without changing the essence of the system.

Of course those that became rich and powerful because of the system don't want to change the system that keeps them rich and powerful. But without change the system might not survive.

[-] Linkerbaan@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago

People aren't so much the issue as policy.

If politicians didn't try to make everything dependant on fossil fuels and embrace renewables we'd probably be carbon neutral already.

[-] otp@sh.itjust.works -3 points 10 months ago

The "problem" is that other parts of the world are more than making up for the declining birth rates in the developed world

[-] GiveMemes@jlai.lu 3 points 10 months ago

If you're nodding at the concept of overpopulation that's not really a "problem" as we're expected to top out around 15 billion as the rest of the world develops and then replacement rate is expected around 12 bil as things level back out from an earlier peak iirc.

[-] riodoro1@lemmy.world 11 points 10 months ago

Hey, maybe less humans means more climate. We haven’t tried that one yet.

[-] cyberpunk007@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago

No comment replies to you, but all the down votes. I'm curious what their take is on this.

[-] Neato@ttrpg.network -3 points 10 months ago

Less humans mean less innovation. It means less energy and then less emissions total, but that's irrelevant long term. Without enough labor to support industry growth and technology, we'll be more on the sustaining ourselves side of labor. Which means we're far more likely to relapse into fossil fuels. Especially if the depopulation is rapid which will destabilize industries.

[-] okamiueru@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The argument that any number of human will stochastically offset its own emission through science and technology is patently absurd. You need a certain amount of people in order to sustain hi tech infrastructure. But 8 billion now and still 8 billion in 2080, which would be the largest possible "natural" change in trajectory of global population, one of the best things for humanity when it comes to global emissions.

The more likely trajectory of 10.5 by 2080 is much more likely to lead to exhaustion of resources and ecosystems, not to mention lead to more wars, famine, and global warming, all of which will fuel each other.

If you want innovation and advancement of human knowledge. The thought of "make more babies" being an important factor is funny as hell. Thanks for the chuckle.

[-] Peddlephile@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago

That's where automation comes in to do the menial repetitive jobs and the remaining humans take on more complex tasks. Everything will work itself out.

[-] tsonfeir@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago

That’s not going to turn into a fetish in Japan at all…

this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024

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