We’ve covered Japan’s demographic woes here before.
Some people scoffed at the ancient island nation’s peril. But now her own prime minister is warning the time to address Nihon’s population crisis is “now or never.”
Japanese Prime minister Fumio Kishida pledged on Monday to take urgent steps to tackle the country’s declining birth rate, saying it was “now or never” for one of the world’s oldest societies.
Japan has in recent years been trying to encourage its people to have more children with promises of cash bonuses and better benefits, but it remains one of the most expensive places in the world to raise a child, according to surveys.
I found multiple studies confirming that money is the number-one barrier to Japanese couples having more kids. Here’s one of them.
What’s heartbreaking is that 70 percent of Japanese couples want more kids. They just don’t think they can afford them.
The lion’s share of Japanese child-rearing costs goes to education.
If you’re not familiar with the Japanese school system, watching a handful of episodes from any slice-of-life anime series will fill you in.
Prior to the 19th century, Japan had a more or less Chinese system designed to prepare lordlings to join the imperial bureaucracy. But in the Meiji era Japan sent fact-finding missions to study foreign education methods. Like America, they adopted the Prussian style compulsory schooling model. But they implemented a turbo version that went year-round.
That’s not even mentioning the intense pressure Japanese culture puts on kids to participate in extracurricular activities. Then you have additional cram schools that offer test prep for the high school exams that pretty much determine the course of each student’s life.
Also like in America, K-12 public school tuition is free. But parents are under growing pressure to spring for expensive private schools, tutors, and special programs.
The whole affair is a web of perverse incentives that put an enormous financial drain on parents while ensuring they can hardly spend time with their kids.
It kind of makes sense when you consider that Japan is one of the least religious first world nations. And that’s saying something.
If you don’t find meaning in God, you’ll seek it somewhere else. And academic achievement seems to form the core of many Japanese kids’ identities.
The fact that this unnatural situation is unsustainable is now coming back to bite its adherents.
Births plunged to a new record low last year, according to official estimates, dropping below 800,000 for the first time – a watershed moment that came eight years earlier than the government had expected.
That most likely precipitated a further population decline in a country where the median age is 49, the highest in the world behind only the tiny city-state of Monaco.
“Our nation is on the cusp of whether it can maintain its societal functions,” Kishida said in a policy speech at the opening of this year’s parliamentary session.
Therein lies the dilemma facing Japan.
You can’t just overturn the education paradigm overnight. Maybe you could totally overhaul the public school system. But the way the Japanese people interact with education as a cultural institution is so baked in that any significant change would create a catastrophic shock.
But if they don’t do something fast, the Japanese economy will implode as the population decline leads to a major contraction.
There’s not much more to say, here.
This is just a huge mess that will take generations to clean up.
We can, however, learn the clear lesson that Prussian style education destroys societies.
Which is all the more reason to raise your own kids.
That’s just one part of not supporting institutions that hate you.
Behold the glorious techno-progessive future of heart broken childless couples and porn-addicted incels.
I think we in what was Christendom have survived the rot of Prussian-model miseducation as long as we have because the Church has been here to undo some of the damage. The Japanese didn’t have that, so they mainlined the 19th Century techno-utopia.
Kyrie eleison
Imagine your ancient peoples dying out and fading away – not from invasion, famine, or plague, but simply because modernity won and overcame your natural urge to procreate. Amazing and sad.
Life is truth, error is death, and modernism is the sum of all errors.
South Korea recently suffered population decline in a time of peace, plenty, and no plague (no, the Coof doesn’t count). That, I believe, is completely unprecedented in history.
As bad as Japan is, SK has the same problem on crystal meth
> no plague (no, the Coof doesn’t count).
Plagues of lies are the worse of all. The symptoms take generations to out and repenting of bad ideas works uphill against Pride.
Of course, this problem will *eventually* solve itself naturally – albeit not soon, or in anything resembling a pretty manner. The population isn’t going to keep naturally declining forever – eventually the situation will change such that it becomes viable and appealing to have children. Of course, that probably won’t come until AFTER the appalling level of damage is done in the process.
Also, on the topic of Japanese education – it is something of a wonder to me that despite everything, anime is very fond of outright *romanticising* High School as a time of glory and fun. I heard somewhere that this happens mostly because extracurricular clubs offer the average Japanese their last taste of anything resembling freedom or unstructured social recreation, before they’re forced into the even more demanding and stifling Japanese Workforce.
CantusTropus,
Yup. Another factor is that the guys are EXPECTED to booze with the boss after work or go play golf with him on the weekend. The result is that men come home at 2 am, then have to head off to work at 7. Women in the workforce are treated as menial coffee servers and are expected to quit once they get pregnant and support their husbands. They get stuck with the kids’ education and all the domestic work.
I’ve taught a lot of women who choose career over family and it’s really sad. I’ve taught businessmen who some admitted to me they deeply resent boozing with the boss or playing golf on the weekend.
They recognize it and desire change but the pace is glacial due to ingrained habits and societal inertia.
xavier
Now there’s change in the air but it’s preceding
And we’re not even talking about the real elephant in the room: Ludicrously high suicide rates.
The low birth rate and the high suicide rate are both symptoms of a society succumbing to hopelessness and despair. When couples decide not to have kids, that’s a pretty good indicator they don’t expect life to be better for the hypothetical kids than for themselves.
Or they’re just using each for sex and never meant to start a family in the first place.
Andrew Phillips,
Yup. In the Asian context, it’s the unrelenting pressure cooker of education (private and parallel) followed by the soul crushing work environment that causes the hopelessness and apathy.
For context, several years ago, officials from the Korean education dept were going to all the cram schools and telling them to shut down for the night (this is 10 pm or later) and telling the kids to go home. They even legislated some regulations ordering time limits of operating hours and closed on some days
Don’t know how successful it was, but I wasn’t surprise officialdom had to crack down.
xavier