In the context of Capitalism, sure, Japan is in trouble.
But then again, any system that demands infinite growth within a finite system has a biological parallel… in cancer. Yes, capitalism is economic cancer.
Japan has a bright future in front of it, if it can successfully pioneer an effective degrowth system that prioritizes the lives of people over Paraiste-Class profits.
Give them some days off.
No one has time for family in Japan
When I watch yt videos about people leaving the workplace at 10pm, I wonder how suicide rate isn’t way higher
There’s a reason so much anime these days is a salaryman dying on the job and reincarnating into a fantasy world.
I think I like the premise a bit more than the show. Zom 100 is about a kid who starts a soul crushing office job only to become the happiest guy alive after the zombie apocalypse starts and he realizes he doesn’t need to go to work anymore.
This. I think there’s so much to love about Japan, especially the cultural leaning towards doing everything with respect, dignity, and skill.
But the megacorpos definitely won in exploiting that, and the general social pressure revolving around workplace culture there is genuinely terrifying to me.
As a US person, our corporate-brainwash culture is awful too, but I’m glad we’re seeing bigger working class pushes to tell our employers “Go kick rocks. My family is more important.”
There is no dignity or respect to the worker by the sound of it
It’s got nothing to do with megacorps, that’s just run of the mill Japanese culture/society.
America has a individualist culture. Thats why we have unions and stuff (for now, anyway…) and don’t have to blow our bosses ego until 11pm every night.
Japan has a very…conformity driven culture. You conform to expectations around you, or you get ostracized heavily and treated like an outsider.
Which is a big driver for this kind of “I ahve to work till 5, then drink with my boss/coworkers until midnight, because if I dont I’ll lose my job and be ostracized” stuff.
Should they bring millions of indians, africans and arabs to help them? We are seeing how its working wonderfully in the west.
I didn’t get your comment. It sounds like you think that’s been bad, but immigration in the US and Europe have been successful ways to grow population and workforce, and the biggest problem has been that exploited nativists keep radicalizing and threatening these people.
That’s a problem, but it’s not actually caused by having too many immigrants.
I’ve read a few articles that said they actually are bringing in Indians at the moment.
Its over. Everywhere they go they bring their 3rd world culture.
nazis like you aren’t welcome here. go back to being a human or stop wasting oxygen.
Wait, are you serious?
You can tell capitalism is super efficient and sustainable by how it totally collapses without fresh babies to sacrifice.
Any system would collapse without newer generations.
Except only one of those systems depends on the exploitation of the working class, ya know, your breeding live stock. Only one of those system destroys a work life balance. Only one leaves the population with little free time and shrinking resources with which to have and raise a kid. Japan is past, and the US is passing, the tipping point. Society may deem it necessary but the potential parents recognize it as untenable.
What happens when the orphan crushing machine has no orphans?
Progressives have made kids useless. In the distant past they could help carry firewood or gay bales around the homestead.
Industrial revolution fucked it up. Sure for a while you could send them down into the mines or get them sweeping chimneys but over time that got outlawed due to the increased danger these jobs involved.
Now, why bother having kids? You can’t do anything with them. Even worse, they play games like Minecraft. You are literally spending your money for them to virtually work in the mines where they don’t bring in any money at all!
Wait, you you’re saying the solution is… being back child labor? We truly are living in some times when that isn’t considered a unique statement.
The children yearn for the mines.
I don’t think any social/political structure would survive without a birth rate
I mean, any system collapses if you don’t have the people to actively participate in it.
I’m not saying that as a defense of capitalism, more so as pointing out how dumb your comment is.
Its not capitalism that causes the over leveraged ponzi scheme, its the lender of last resort they call the Bank of Japan.
In a capitalist lending system you wouldn’t get bailed out for making risky loans, so there wouldn’t be the moral hazard, or the heightened cantillon effect to profit off debt accumulation.
Which is why, in the U.S., the rich are turning back abortion rights and access to birth control, and gutting our public education. They could, instead, work to build a country where people felt safe, and supported–healthcare, jobs with decent wages, education, etc.–but the filthy rich are psychopaths who care only about themselves, and will do nothing that costs them money, power, and control. Instead, they’ll GLADLY watch the people (people they depend, incidentally, for what good is power and control, if there’s no one to wield it over?) suffer at great levels in attempts to achieve their goals.
It takes a lot of poor people to make one filthy rich person.
Babies are expensive and time consuming to develop into useful serfs. The US is not yet hitting most of the consequences from low birth rates because it’s balanced out by immigration. As long as they keep encouraging and welcoming immigration ….
Well-said. They don’t see people as people, they see them as farm stock plotted on spreadsheets that they can manipulate by pulling levers.
And happiness just isn’t a variable they would ever think of pulling a lever to increase. In fact I suspect they see a lack of it as an effective motivator, as long as it’s managed properly through division and distraction, and those desperately upset little data points don’t start assembling guillotines.
The national pyramid scheme
Well, if you prioritize shareholder growth, before Support of children and make sure people have to work super hard to be able to sustain themselves and can’t afford to have a family… Then you should not be supervised that you don’t have any babies in the country
Lets see how China handles it down the road before we mark this one a problem of one specific system, rather than just humans seemingly sucking in sustainable long term planning on large scales in general.
China is also capitalist though, and they’re also starting to suffer from the same issue.
No, China is Communist, it says so right in their name.
/sarcasm
No lie, you a funny guy
I believe Japan has less inequality than the US. Not sure on that, but I think it’s true. I think in this case we see work culture playing a role. The only country in the world with a worse work culture than the US is Japan. No one has time to even think about having kids when you are a company man there. It’s similar in the US.
The only country in the world with a worse work culture than the US is Japan.
China too.
Even as economist talk about the Lost Decade (really, two decades) in Japan, the unemployment rate has always been relatively subdued compared to the US:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRUN25TTJPA156N
From about 1.7% in 1990, and then two spikes that just about reach 5.0% in 2002 and 2009. Not only that, but that’s the range for people 25-54 years old, which isn’t equivalent to the headline number typical in the US. There is an equivalent in published US data, and you can see it’s much higher and spikier than Japan:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14000060
This doesn’t mean everything is OK for the working class in Japan. Housing prices are astronomical, requiring 100 year multi-generational loans. Working culture is also far more stressful. However, I think it’s fair to ask who the “Lost (two) Decades” is really affecting.
requiring 100 year multi-generational loans
This is the first I’ve heard of this and the fact that it’s real is insane to me.
I guess it works pretty differently to our system where you borrow x money at y interest rate then? Because otherwise a slight interest rate change has a huge impact, or paying slightly more back would reduce the time to pay it by decades.
Because it’s BS. It’s glaringly fake and calls into question the rest of the claims of the post.
Housing prices aren’t even insane, especially outside of Tokyo. And the property prices don’t even go up. AND you can get 35 year housing loans at under 1% interest. The main reason housing prices have gone up at all is that construction materials cost have gone up due to inflation, Ukraine war, covid supply and demand issues.
The only country in the world with a worse work culture than the US is Japan
What about North Korea?
Not really relevant. I mean technically there are countries with child slavery so I guess if you want to entirely miss the point on purpose you could go with one of those.
You mean The People’s Republic of Korea? They’re a communist utopia, aren’t they? /S
Get to work juice boys!
I live and work in Japan, and it definitely is not a very condusive environment for younger Japanese people to have children. My wife and I are both foreigners, and we are in out late 30’s and just had our first. The country has some really great benefits and support services for having children, but we definitely would not be able to do this if we worked for Japanese companies, and with the Japanese work mentality.
While it IS getting better, work being the central pillar of life and the expectations from the older generations are still very much a thing. The long hours of paper pushing, the culture of promotion based on age and time served rather than innovation and hard work takes a toll on people. If you are not living in the office in your 20s to show your dedication, you are looked down upon, at least accoridng to my Japanese friends.
Immigration could help fix some of this. Japan is a desireable, largely affordable country, that is safe when it comes to raising children. Living here as a foreigner though has specific challenges, and your job prospects are pretty poor unless you are lucky, and access to housing and just general living can be challenging, even if you can speak Japanese.
I just got a new job in Kyoto, and I currently live in Tokyo. I would say around 40% of the houses we applied to look at would not even let us see the properties because we are foreigners. That’s 100% legal and totally ok to say here, and I take that in stride. In Australia (where I am from), they would either just tell you to piss off, or show you the property knowing you don’t have a chance, so at least they are upfront about it here I guess. Getting a credit card is a massive ordeal, which you kinda need here because debit cards are increasingly hard to find, and they don’t even work for all bills and systems, and getting a bank account … it all just snowballs.
Also anything outside of the major cities is kinda dead. I love it, but living and thriving there in places that have more space that would probably promote having big families, is nearly impossible, or at least impossibly boring. This is not unique to Japan, Australia is largely the same outside of the main cities.
Not sure what the fix is. But annecdotally I see these articles all the time, and yet there are kids and younger families always around, so not sure if it is as serious as they are saying, or more media hype?
Lived in Japan for many years, came back to the USA for many of the reasons you touch on. I knew a few foreigners who had non-English-teacher type jobs, but mostly, it was English teacher or English juku owner. The systemic issues, for young Japanese and for foreigners, in Japan really need to be dealt with if they have any hope of slowing their population decline. So, not going to happen.
Japan is never going to have enough immigration to significantly impact the population decline. Even back in the early 2000s, it would have taken millions of immigrants a year. Now, forget about it.
Living in inaka is not bad but not great either, for most people. So, tiny apartments in or near big cities or large houses in the middle of nowhere are pretty much the choices. Jobs in inaka? Fisherman, elderly care, sakaya, maybe some other generic retail for the eldest sons who couldn’t escape. And, of course, government jobs.
Re: media hype, yes there are still young people. But not enough. Societies need 2.1(-ish) children per couple to maintain population equilibrium. Japan, South Korea, Italy, and several other wealthy nations are way below that. Add in the Japanese propensity to live for a long time, and Logan’s Run becomes more and more thinkable each year. When the population pyramid becomes whatever shape parallel lines || are, the economics of a modern, wealthy society break down.
I gave a PD session for Japanese teachers back in like 2004 or so about why learning English would be helpful, because they might end up with a lot of immigrant children in their classes. (Or, I didn’t say, because you could use your English skills to look for jobs outside of Japan.) Of course, immigration barely happened, and many of those teachers are probably close to retirement age by now. So, my bad, I guess. Someone should do that PD today, because the situation is even worse now.
I’ve always had this silly dream of running a large, wealthy tech company, and attempting a startup in Japan, not reliant on business with other Japanese companies, that promotes a healthier work culture, and then stuffs the high productivity results in the faces of other companies. As a stretch goal, it could even locate out in the burbs, with an investment in better infrastructure access.
Japan has so many great things about it, but the major points around banking, sexism, and seniority really twist the image.
Its hyped by FT and more economy driven outlets because it makes them nervous. The replacement rate of births was always enough to support retirement pension plans. Now it’s not.
Japan is way ahead of the curve on this inevitable trend than other countries so it will be really interesting see how it adjusts and what markets are affected by this.
In terms of buying a house, is remote work really not a thing in Japan? Living in a remote village sounds lime a dream. Otherwise, are there no towns/villages where foreigners sort of band together and are allowed to buy property? Just curious about how Japan functions
Part of my YouTube diet is English-speaking expat YouTubers who live in Japan (UK, US, Canada, Australia), and just based on what they have shared there are some firms that specialize in property searches by foreigners. Not like “buy up a Japanese town and make it Australian”, just networking with more open-to-foreigner Japanese, and being an interface with foreigners to help them learn to integrate.
Like everywhere in the world, remote villages in Japan lack services. From restaurants to health care to home supplies, it’s more time consuming and expensive to get some things, and others are just not available. From the YouTubers I watch, the community connections enabled by the great mass transit and walkable urban areas in much of Japan (though not all - some parts ate the car-centric pill) are what keep them there, and the friction to maintaining friendships from a rural area has pushed several to move to Tokyo.
As far as “how is Japan adjusting” to population decline, elder care sucks. A lot of people die alone unnoticed (kodokushi). Markets adjust to lower supply of workers (Japan is at the cutting edge of automation), but quality of life for seniors can’t be automated.
fear of decline
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Clearly solid, factual, data there.
Oh no, not our out of control population growth fueled by resources running out as I type this comment and causing unspeakable damage to the biosphere of the planet.
Whatever will we do if our numbers fall below 7 billion.
I don’t disagree, but the systems necessary to make this happen non-destructively just do not exist.
BTW, you may like the limits to growth study. https://archive.org/details/TheLimitsToGrowth
Although it is kind of a downer. In the 70s, they predicted the downfall of society. We’re on track with the prediction, more or less.
Why not just promote immigration. America seems to not have that problem
A culture of xenophobia
nothing about the idea of having children appeals to me in the slightest
Me neither 😆 and now my son is 5 y old
We discovered him about 4 month after creation…
Everyone has their opinions and circumstances, but anecdotally my time with children has been some of the happiest.
it’s a good thing some people like kids because otherwise im not sure what happens
I love my kids and my life with them. People who pridefully claim they don’t want children is similar to people being prideful of not eating pizza.
No one gives a shit about your preferences.
your preferences about my preferences can suck my balls
Some body get this guy a Netflix special. This joke is so good.
thanks
I love my kids and my life with them
No one gives a shit about your preferences.
That’s exactly what I’m saying
Not even the initial sexy time?
i heard there’s more sexy time without kids
You heard right
Making children :) Having children :(
imagine being so racist that it forces your country to fall apart. they made their own bed, time for some laying in it.
Its their country. Let them decide.
What are you even talking about?
Japan is historically an extremely racist empire. That contributes to anti-immigration.
I know, let’s all move to Japan. Cheap real estate and no Cheeto.
This problem is not isolated to Japan. Countries all across the world are facing the same issue and have been for a number of years.
Create a shitty, miserable, society with no rights or support, and people do not want to bring children into it… who’d guess?
The flannel has been wrung dry to the detriment of the working class, there is no where to go, no more water to squeeze from them. This is global society / capitalism falling apart.
Capitalism is the best we’ve got. Even North Korea has acknowledged this. With other systems people starve en masse. My hope is that we get over the taboo of regulation. Capitalism fucks up real-estate and wealth distribution. And health-care should 100% be government funded.
It seems like you already understand some of the limitations of capitalism. Look into why regulation has gradually been rolled back in the US since the 70s. Why did politicians start to agree with corporate execs demands for lower regulation. Keywords to look up - regulatory capture.
On a separate point, there’s plenty of famines that have occurred in capitalist economies due to capitalist exploitation - that is make more money, at the cost of of creating a famine. Some estimates put the deaths due to famines under capitalism higher than those under socialism. I used to simply know only of the famines under socialism and not know of the famines under capitalism.
Finally the capitalism we live in since the Great Depression is significantly different than the capitalism before it. Socialists, actual Marxists in western counties, yes the US included, were actively involved in the policies that created the welfare states across the west along with the regulatory regime. Some of FDR’s economic advisors were Marxian economists.
That was the compromise to save capitalism from imminent worker revolution. The unregulated, no-safety-net version of the system had lead to the conditions for such revolution. The socialist policies that averted the revolution in have slowly been dismantled over time and the system is reverting to the pre-Great Depression state. Faster in some countries than others.
If you want to reform capitalism to the point where it can no longer revert to economic liberalism (free market fundamentalism), you’d have to almost completely eliminate wealth accumulation. You could only do that by changing the ownership of the means of production. E.g. all employees in all corporations become equal owners (or controllers) of the machines and therefore the decisions on sharing the wealth those machines produce, instead of those decisions being made by a tiny number of major shareholders. You’d also have to significantly expand the industries operated by the government. At that point you end up with socialism. And yes socialism doesn’t mean central planning and no markets. Capitalism doesn’t mean no central planning and just markets. We do plenty of central planning in capitalist economies across governments and large corporations.
I’m not asking you to change your mind today. Just pointing out a few things to look into in case you haven’t.
Seems super likely that capitalism is going to be a major factor in our extinction. Maybe we could have a bit less of it and actually survive as a species
The major shareholders have voted down your proposal.
Even if they did want children, without the support systems, it may not be feasible for them to have kids. Having them might mean choosing to starve or go without a house.
Even if you’re in a country with a public health care system, a sick/young child means having to take time off work to care for them.
Countries all across the world
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate
Isn’t it interesting that the more “developed” countries have the lowest birth rates.
It’s what follows education. It’s the largely uneducated areas of the world that still raw dog like there’s no tomorrow.
Solid racism. People aren’t raw dogging because they didn’t learn how sex works in school. Even if your correlation is “accurate” (according to imperial definitions/measurements of “education”), that’s not causation.
People also tend to have more kids when the life expectancy of their kids if very low. Colonized people have low life expectancy because their labor and resources are exploited by the privileged.
So apparently under Sharia law, Muslim men can have anal sex with a girl under 8, and vaginal with a girl over 8.
And Muslims can openly lie about what is and isn’t true under Sharia law???
Exactly its not some mysterious problem no matter how much the government and media try to frame it as one, people of the age to have kids have no time for kids and no money for kids so no wonder they have no desire for kids.
