The latest numbers on Japanese population make for a dismal reading — the number of people who died in 2022 (1.56 million) was roughly twice as big as the number of newborn children (771,000). Based on residency registrations, the country’s Internal Ministry estimates a total population loss of some 800,000 last year. This is the largest total drop in population since comparable statistics were first collated in 1968.
Japan now has 122.4 million nationals, down from a peak of over 128 million some 15 years ago.
But the issue of Japan’s shrinking population goes much further into the past. Since the 1990s, successive Japanese governments have been aware that the population would start to decline and tried to offer solutions. And yet, the speed of the contraction has caught even the experts by surprise. In 2017, for example, the Tokyo-based National Institute of Population and Social Security Research forecast that the annual number of births would not fall below the 800,000 threshold until 2030.
With the news on Japan’s population decline growing ever more grim, the government of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has announced a series of efforts to encourage more people to have children.
Japan ‘on the brink’
In January, Kishida warned that the nation is “on the brink” of a crisis and that his government would spend around 20 trillion yen (around €128 billion, $140 billion) on measures to support young couples who wish to have more children. This corresponds to around 4% of Japan’s GDP, and is nearly double the amount that the government had earmarked for the same goal in fiscal 2021.
The prime minister also set up a panel to devise ways to spend the extra funds. He also hosted an event in Tokyo in late July to mark the launch of a nationwide campaign to support children and families. The government has agreed on increasing child allowances and putting in additional effort to eradicate child poverty and abuse. New fathers will also be encouraged to take paternity leave and additional funding will go into pre-school facilities so that working parents are able to return to work. Parents will also get greater tax breaks.
Kishida said he aims to win the support of society for children and parents.
“We hope that a social circle friendly to child-rearing will spread nationwide,” he said at the launch event.
Critics, however, are not entirely convinced by the latest proposals. They warn that the previous government had also tried to use spending to encourage a baby boom, but Japanese society has failed to respond.
The population is rapidly aging, and the number of people over 65 is already at close to 30% in Japan. Japan’s neighbors China and South Korea are facing similar troubles, and the number of senior citizens is expected to continue climbing in the next three decades.
Will funding be effective?
“The government is focusing very much on the economic aspect and while the budget they are allocating to the problem is very large and it sounds positive, we will have to see whether it can truly be effective,” said Masataka Nakagawa, senior researcher with the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.
Nakagawa agreed that the latest population statistics were worrying, but warned there are other factors that need to be considered, such as the falling number of marriages. People in Japan are typically getting married later in life and opting to have fewer children, primarily a result of financial pressures, he said.
Chisato Kitanaka, an associate professor of sociology at Hiroshima University, said governments have failed to devise effective policies to solve the population problem, despite knowing that a decline was inevitable.
“There have long been a lot of hurdles for young people who want to have children to overcome,” she told DW. Those include financial and educational concerns, she said, but arguably the biggest problem is social attitudes.
“In Japan, having a child means that a couple has to get married,” she said. “Only 2% of children are born out of wedlock in Japan, but other countries take a far more ‘flexible’ approach to the concept of a family.”
“This is what is considered socially acceptable here and that makes raising a child as a single mother difficult because she has to work and earn money, while at the same time she is singled out by society,” she added.
More foreigners in Japan
Kitanaka believes the government should dramatically increase welfare payments to families to help them raise their children and reduce the substantial costs of education, particularly at the tertiary level.
While looking into the population statistics, Japanese officials also found that nearly 3 million foreign residents were living in Japan, up by more than 289,000, or over 10%, from the previous year. The increase puts the number of foreigners in the Asian country at record high.
And yet, many Japanese are unwilling to seriously contemplate large-scale immigration as a way to solve Japan’s population problem and provide a stable supply of workers.
“It is difficult,” Kitanaka admitted. “There are clearly more foreign residents of Japan now but we as a society are not really thinking about it as a long-term issue. And there are many in Japan who are still not ready to accept foreigners. We need to discuss the sort of Japan that we want to live in for the future.”
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I taught English in Japan (JET) for one year, and at the end I said what a lot of people say: I’d love to visit, but I’m never going to work here again.
The work culture in Japan is fucked. The fact that the amount of time you spend at work, not your actual output, determines how “productive” you are is so fucking stupid. I worked my contract hours and I was seen as lazy. Despite the fact that everything I was asked to do was always done and done well, the fact that I didn’t come in 2 hours early and nap at my desk meant I was lazy. Add onto that the fact that I only got a (generous for Japan) 15 days of nenkyuu (paid days off), which you can’t actually use because what happens if you get sick. Sick leave exists, but does it? Does it really? The one time I tried to use it, I was told “it’d be better for everyone if you didn’t”, and then had to use my nenkyuu anyway.
And that was me working a pretty privileged position! If I was coming from Vietnam to work in a retirement home, I’m sure the working conditions would be far worse with the threat of deportation looming over my head. Immigration is a band aid at best. As soon as immigrants have the opportunity to move somewhere better, they will of course take that.
In contrast, I now live in the Netherlands, which shockingly has some of the least generous child benefits in the EU. And yet, we get about 100€/month from the government in support, plus about 50% the cost of childcare paid for. My wife gets 4 months of maternity leave at full pay (I only get 5 days which is super fucked), with up to 3 years at 60% pay with a guarantee of her job being there when she gets back. We each have 25+ days off a year, which are actually used for days off, if the kid gets sick, we can use sick leave to care for it, and sick leave is unlimited. Also, healthcare for children is 100% paid by the government. And with all of that, we’re barely in a position to be able to consider having children.
Father parental leave has increased a lot this year though. It’s now 5 weeks instead of 5 days.
You’re talking about the Netherlands? It’s 5 days fully paid.
I can take several months if I want it, but I have to take a 30% pay cut, which we can’t afford. Paternity leave in the Netherlands sucks.
Still, it used to be 2 days paid and that’s it. So, it still sucks, but has gotten much better.
I wouldn’t call 3 extra days “much better”.
Well it’s now 5 days 100% and 5 weeks 70% instead of 2 days 100%. I call that much better.
the fact that I didn’t come in 2 hours early and nap at my desk meant I was lazy.
I’m curious, if you were in the office but obviously doing not-work activities like playing video games or table-top games with coworkers instead of napping would that be seen negatively?
For Japan, you could encourage growth in the economy again, and encourage population growth by simply requiring companies to give ample vacation time, and require people to use said vacation time.
It’s fucking ridiculous how much time Japanese people are forced to work. They basically spend the entire day at the office, sometimes the entire night with staff because companies force staff into not mandatory but totally mandatory afterwork drinking parties, and by the time people get back to their tiny homes and apartments, they might get a Sunday off to sleep off the exhaustion, then it’s back into the office.
Many Japanese youth never even see their father, meanwhile they themselves are relentlessly robbed of their time by schools, after school clubs, cram schools, English Schools, test prep, and stupid amounts of homework they’re expected to finish on top of that. Many of my students are on summer holiday, but are just as busy as school time thanks to all the homework they’re saddled with and the clubs and jukus certainly don’t let up for summer.
Nobody respects other people’s free time here, thus people don’t have the energy to do anything outside of their daily cycle, let alone fuck. Why buy a game console, TV, or a nice car when you never have time to enjoy it. Why go to Okinawa, or Fukuoka or Hokkaido when you’re only going to have 3 days tops to enjoy it, and if you do somehow get a week to blow, why not take the dream trip to Hawaii, and spend your money out of the country.
Japanese population and economic troubles ultimately cycle back to the end of free time that the miracle period encouraged, and the bubble economy drove into overdrive. They have tried everything but taken this issue seriously, and the only thing they’ve come close to resembling addressing this is creating more national holidays, which are always way off from any vacation period, and many companies try to get out of giving time off, ands those that can’t expect workers to make all the time up the day after.
They are literally working themselves to death here.
What good could possibly come from unlimited population growth?
From 1973 to 2023 the world population doubled. If that trend continues, doubling every 50 years, by the year 2123 there will be 32 Billion people on Earth.
We can’t even house and feed the 8 billion we have now, not to mention the ecological damage that would be inevitable due to expansion and urbanization.
Even if we just double the current population to 16 billion people 100 years from now it won’t be sustainable. We need to find a new system that isn’t reliant on the next generation being bigger than the previous generation because we’re less than a century from it collapsing anyway. We have finite space on this planet and infinite growth will fill that up very quickly.The main problem in Japan is the birth rate basically doesn’t even replenish the outgoing population. Japan also have one of the longest life expectancy. Tell me how can you take care of 10 seniors in a retirement home if there’s only 1 working age person to take care of them?
Robots!
Half the people are hand-wringing about robots taking all the jobs. The other half are hand-wringing about population decline leaving too few working-age people to do all the jobs.
Seems like these 2 problems cancel each other out.😎
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The easiest way is to make sure it’s not a 10:1 ratio to begin with. And, You don’t need 1 nurse per person, if you give a nurse 2 patients for the day for a 2:1 ratio it’s better care than most people get right now.
“The easiest solution is to simply not have a problem”
Wow thanks.
Sure, unlimited population growth is unsustainable, but advanced countries are facing the opposite problem. At a fertility rate of 1, each generation is half the size of the previous one. And the developing world is not far behind these fertility trends. At this rate, humans may end up leaving the planet to the AIs.
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A lot can be done, but their culture and traditions simply won’t allow it.
They seem to rather die off as a nation rather than alter their thinking. It’s sad to see, but at the same time that stubbornness to change is the most Japanese thing ever. Their culture revolves around tradition and they rather keep those traditions than open their country up to fresh, new ideas and people.
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It’s not a problem. The system requireing growth is the problem
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Ya we should all be aspiring to stop growing the population, the real issue is no one seems to be looking for solutions to making smaller populations work rather than trying to stop the decline.
It’s too expensive to have a kid in Japan. There aren’t enough childcare to take care of the kids so one parent usually ends up staying home, making household income low.
Japan can’t fix this by having bandage solutions like paying couples to have children, or subsidizing deliveries or schools. Yes, they help, but only in the short term. Prospective parents will think about long term prospects and opportunity cost in having kids. Japan has change the whole system to make it work for couples to have kids.
Japan being a super racist country will now lead to their old ones rotting away without any care or help, and their social security system falling apart for the rest.
Apart from that a decreasing population is 100% positive for the planet. Especially in the case of such a wasteful and polluting country per capita like Japan.
Source on the last point?
I’m not the person you are responding to, and in general I don’t agree with their post, but there are some rather strange practices in Japan which are absolutely wasteful.
Years back I used to work in the tradeshow industry. Think CES, FABTECH, SEMA and a ton of smaller industry shows. There are tradeshows all over the world but Japan was different. Japan has a “build and burn” policy. Most booths are designed to come apart, get stored in the off season in a warehouse, and are typically used many of times. They’d be used for a few years and then reskinned to cha ge their look and keep them fresh.
That’s not what would happen in Japan. After every show, they would burn the booths for that show. Every. Single. Show. It was wildly inefficient. Some of these shows are massive - a little mini city put up a few weeks prior to an event, then the event runs for about a week, and then in Japan they’d take all those booths and just burn them. It’s wild and I can’t imagine the environmental impact of doing that after every show.
Now this was years back, so things might be different, but with how slow Japan is to change, I’d be surprised if that is the case.
I think similar with their houses. While most houses in the US can last up to hundred years. It is common in Japan for houses to depreciate to worthless in a matter of a decade. So it’s common there to buy old house, demolish, and rebuild from scratch. Repeat after every 10 to 20 years.
Excellent example. They also are incredibly backwards when it comes to basic technology. Like they seem to love endless paperwork and still use fax machines. It’s such a weird dichotomy where they have such advanced tech such as robots, but still are stuck in the 80s for other things.
To be fair, that’s the US too. Just not the exact same things. Can’t speak for other countries.
EVERY country has its idiosyncrasies but the bizarre cross between super old fashioned and bleeding edge is very much a Japanese thing. In the US a lot of that stuff wouldn’t fly simply because we just don’t really follow tradition. We don’t usually give a shit about how things were done back-in-the-day. We aren’t a particularly history focused country - for better or worse. In this case, very much for the better, for other things not so much.
I getcha and I agree. I’m being pretty vague and talking about different nuances. ^^
Fax machines?? Seriously? Do they use them so they look busy sending off faxes or something? So bizarre.
Looking busy seems to be a common theme from the many videos I’ve seen of Japanese work environment.
Jeez, that’s interesting!
That sure was an interesting industry to work in. Nothing quite like it, quite honestly. Learned a bunch of crazy shit like the “build and burn” stuff and a whole lot more shady business stuff as well. Don’t think it will ever recover in our post-COVID world though. Those days are long done now.
Not the one you asked. I don’t have any statistics, but from what I’ve seen of YouTubers living or visiting Japan is an obscene amount of plastic on the food wrapping/packaging. You open a cardboard box and then there’s a plastic bag inside with small individual portions wrapped in plastic for instance.
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Sad to see nazis finding their way to Lemmy, it was so nice without you.
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Already took them, but thanks. Now go back to Truth Social or Twitter.
Super racist with the lowest crime and safest streets
Nah no correlation, let’s continue to flee blue states for no reason
I’ll say it again. Pay people to have kids. A lot. Include healthcare. It’s stupidly expensive to raise a kid in a developed nation and if you want to raise the birthrate you’re gonna have to offset the costs. Especially since we live in a capitalist hell where must people live paycheck-to-paycheck.
Or just you know improve living conditions and people will naturally want to have kids
Many people will not have kids if that significantly effects their career prospects. Because why would you do that? I’ve seen with my borthers wives what it meant for them to have children and it was basically the end of their careers, no matter how hard they tried.
Right, there will always be a subset who don’t want kids but there are plenty of people that I personally and no personally know of that have tried for years to have kids, that’s not for lack of interest! (I guess it’s pretty easy to perform tho haha)
All stats say the opposite. Birth rates decline as wealth of a country goes up.
No. Birth rates decline as people stop being able to afford to live— and food is the biggest factor. There is a big difference between “a nation’s wealth” and “the wealth of the people”.
Why not both tho
I mean realistically the most obvious thing to me is that something has to be done to make the prospect of having children less daunting. I can’t speak to Japan, but for my friends here, in our early 30s, we’re only just now getting to a place where moving out of our parents/a 5 person roommate situation is feasible. Many of us don’t have long-term romantic prospects, and work all the fucking time. Ok top of that, having a kid just sounds terrifying. The cost, and amount of effort needed to see a kid not have a terrible life is daunting (I’m a teacher. Just imaging the amount of effort I, as a parent, would need to put in to have a average kid succeed in a school environment is horrifying)
I imagine a real intervention for this sort of thing looks like less work; good, free child care; our cities building culturally relevant community spaces that people actually want to go to outside of the internet; and creating a culture of community-oriented sharing of the responsibilities of caring for children. In short, we’d need to make our society one that’s less hostile to having kids. That seems pretty obvious, and from my understanding, a lot of these factors are worse in Japan than in the US.
we’d need to make our society one that’s less hostile to having kids
You allude to some of this, but in addition, and as a precondition, we need to make our society one that’s less hostile to the people that currently exist in it.
So basically be more like northern EU.
They also have less children because of the reasons mentioned above. Being good at your job and simultaneously being good as a parent is almost impossible to do.
At least one parent will have to take significant cuts to their career. Even if you are a person who would like to do that, you probably still won’t because it’s incredibly risky. When you get divorced or when you are old it almost certainly means being poor when you didn’t focus on career.
It’s been becoming like how they describe in Northern Europe over the last 15 years though. Things are better than the US in terms of statutory rights and work culture, but people are worse off in real terms than pre-2008. Especially so in the UK, which has become a low-wage high-CoL country for the overall majority of people.
Probably, but give us the numbers. Did it work? Does whichever Northern EU country you’re talking about, whose social programs we can all be jealous of, have stable population?
In the US, we do have a similar problem, but not as bad, and covered by immigration. A significant part of our society seems caught by xenophobia and isolationism, without comprehending they are choking off their own lifeblood
However, this really needs to get more attention: Japan and Korea are just the “canaries” where most developed countries are trending. I do feel like this could be disastrous for societies, and requires long term thinking to stabilize population. I feel like the 1970’s again, trying to persuade people about global warming: if we act now, relatively cheap and minor changes can prevent the worst effects. We all know how that went
This problem will fix itself once all these geriatric morons die off. That goes for basically all problems in the whole world.
New geriatric morons are created daily.
Busting nuts in Japanese ladies, probably.
I’m ready to enlist for this service.
https://media.tenor.com/An7o31StRbcAAAAd/starship-troopers.gif
Ah, I knew I’d find this coomer response somewhere in here. There’s always the genius with sperm for braincells ready to make this response to these kind of articles.
Sounds like you’ve got me all figured out. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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It’s a problem because our entire economic system is based on growth and it will be complicated to have economic growth with a decrease in population. Now the fact that our system is based on continuous growth is probably a problem bigger than the decline in population.
Just do what South Korea tried: Give people the “option” of working 69 hours a week.
Opening up options for immigration that allow a reasonably easy path to citizenship would help.
Short term. As a ‘Murican where our own population drop is hidden by immigration, but half our population is xenophobic and isolationist, hating all imigrants ……. Don’t steal our bandaid from us. Keep blocking immigration so our own keeps going a little longer
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Well fuck.
That’s what the man requested.
