The Land of the Rising Sun may have no tomorrow if a solution to the economically advanced but spiritually demoralized nation’s fertility woes isn’t found.
Japan’s childlessness crisis has gained international notoriety over the past several years. But the crisis goes beyond the much-discussed “herbivore” phenomenon of young men withdrawing from the dating scene.
According to the results of the gender equality survey conducted by the Japanese government last year, the epidemic of anti-nuptial, anti-natal sentiment affects both sexes. And it’s getting much worse.
Japan Today reports:
More than one-third of unmarried adults in their 20s to 40s have never been in a relationship and one-fourth have no intention of ever getting married, a recent survey found.
At 34.1 percent, the ratio of single men and women who have never had a romantic relationship was at a record high since Recruit Holdings Co, a staffing service group, began conducting surveys on people’s views on marriage in 2017.
Among the respondents in their 20s, 19.4 percent of women and 23.7 percent of men said having a romantic relationship is a waste of time and money. The percentage was lower among older male respondents, but it was notably higher among female respondents in their 30s at 23.6 percent, rising sharply from 14.6 percent in the previous survey in 2021.
Among men of all age groups who do not want to marry, the top reason, given by 42.5 percent, was the financial strain of married life. As for women, 40.5 percent said they do not want to compromise their freedom and independence.
Left unexplained by respondents was the question of what good personal freedom and independence were if the aggregate result of individuals using those liberties is national suicide.
If Japan’s childlessness crisis continues, the last Japanese person will die ca. AD 2500.
While 46.1 percent of all respondents said they want to marry eventually, the number has been on the downtrend, falling from 55.4 percent in 2017 and 52.6 percent in 2021.
The crisis even caught the attention of the BBC, which interviewed a typical Japanese career woman.
Though the woman listed three reasons for Japan’s childlessness crisis, they all collapse into one root cause: rampant materialism.
In particular, her mentions of motherhood conflicting with academic and career goals are supported by studies that link declining birth rates to rising female educational attainment. Not only do college and work demand much of women’s time during their peak childbearing years, women will admit that they dislike the prospect of marrying men with lower education and pay than theirs.
Related: Millennials: Depressed and Disordered
This link between increased female educational attainment and decreased fertility isn’t just correlative. It’s been shown to be causal.
In considering whether female education actually drives a decline in the TFR, one might ask whether the opposite is true – do women who prefer smaller families want to study longer? However, the evidence from sub-Saharan Africa clearly supports the causal role of female education in fertility decline. For example, an education reform in Kenya that increased the length of primary education by a year resulted in increased female educational attainment, and delayed marriage and fertility. One randomized control trial found that reducing the cost of school uniforms in Kenya not only reduced dropout rates, but also reduced teenage marriage and childbearing. Another study found that increasing female education by one year in Nigeria reduced early fertility by 0.26 births.
The causal relationship between rising numbers of women in the classroom and the office and demographic collapse extends to advanced nations, as well. A common complaint among women in Japan’s mainland neighbor China concerns the difficulty of finding men who are better educated and higher earners than they are.
A quote from the great Bruce Lee would seem to be apt:
We shall find the answer when we examine the problem, the problem is never apart from the answer, the problem IS the answer, understanding the problem dissolves the problem.
In the case of the childlessness crisis, the problem arises from radical Modernism and materialism leading millions to forsake the good of doing what they ought for the license of doing what they think they want.
Japan presents a sharp cautionary tale in which embracing Western Liberalism proved to be a national suicide pact. We can only pray they dissolve that Faustian bargain before time runs out.
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Japan has recognized this problem for years. So bad that every now and then they’d go out of their way to make anime involving family and children to encourage people for form relationships and have children. I’m not aware of any previous attempts of this before 2018, but School Babysitter (2018) was the first anime to pop on my radar that explicitly was made for this reason. In modern times, we see SpyxFamily taking center stage which I wouldn’t doubt is acting as a double to encourage marriage and starting a family.
Even worse so, any Westerner who thinks they can get themselves a cute anime waifu (Japanese woman) will be hard pressed to make it happen. I’ve seen multiple Westerners who live in Japan report the women over there just want to have sex and most marriages end in divorce due to stark cultural differences.
If materialism is the problem, perhaps a total economic collapse would be the best thing for them, in a way, hitting the rest button for them.
The problem isn’t just consumerist materialism, it’s epistemic materialism.
Take another look at the fertility chart above. The current, ongoing downturn started in the WWII era. That was when we made the Emperor go on national radio and announce he wasn’t divine.
It’s hard for Westerners to grasp the profound cultural shockwaves that declaration sent. Imagine if the Soviet Union had won WWIII and not only made Reagan issue an unconditional surrender on live TV, but also forced John Paul II to deny Jesus’ divinity and declare the Church a purely human NGO during the same broadcast.
There’s no sugarcoating it. We broke the Japanese spirit. Of course they could solve this problem. They just don’t see a good enough reason why.
A total economic collapse could be the harsh medicine that’s needed, but only if it opens them at last to faith in Jesus Christ.
I always go back to Shusaku Endo in regards to this. He used to describe Japan as a swamp and that everything put in there merely gets dragged down into the marsh. He spent his whole life trying to spread Catholicism to Japan but could never pierce their hide. It’s a defense mechanism leftover from having their spirit utterly crushed in WWII. They never truly found anything to fill that hole and it’s only gotten worse over time.
The “Based Japan” memes are only just that. The only way to solve the meaning issue is to find meaning. The problem is that they were conquered by secularism, not an actual religion. Until secularism is defeated, nothing is going to change.
But I do think it will. It’s just going to take some time.
I also think that Satan is terrified of what would happen if Japan is Christianized and has devoted a great deal of effort to preventing it.
My son has noted from watching anime that the Japanese seem to want to be Christian, if they could only bring themselves to believe it.
All hearts are restless until they rest in Christ.
Native Japanese belief (i.e. Shinto) is perhaps the only pure strain of paganism still believed in an urban nation. (You can contrast this with neo-paganism, which is just dressing up atheism and/or satanism.) They layer Buddhism on top of it, but outside of monks that’s basically just to talk about the afterlife. Many buddhas are even reinterpreted as Shinto gods. Just like the Vikings, the Gauls, etc. this puts the Japanese in a very good spot to be receptive to Christianity. This is why it had to be suppressed by such extreme measures, and how Christians preserved their faith for century despite those measures (and no outside help.)
But at the same time since WWII they have accepted the bulk of the western liberal mindset. Just like how Christianity is an aesthetic afterthought to most boomers, so too with Shinto and Buddhism. This makes it difficult to have an honest conversion to Christianity. They are more likely to conclude that Christian weddings are nice to look at, that Catholic schools seem effective at teaching children, and forget about it as they devote the core of their life to making money for no higher purpose.
Chesterton would say that pagans will naturally adopt Christianity, because they know that they are dirty but do not know how to get cleansed. The modern Japanese have been convinced by the west that there is nothing wrong with them in the first place, hence Christianity is superfluous.
I heard from a Japanese missionary recently that despite Japanese being the #2 unreached people group, in his own experience he found that many of them have been receptive when he shares the Gospel to them. An altar call will see responses from multiple people who heard it for the first time.
This was surprising to him given Japan’s reputation as a “Missionary graveyard” when he first started.
So perhaps Japan is reaching a cultural turning point.
Good news, indeed.
Who’s #1?
Had to look it up. Should be Bangladesh.
https://joshuaproject.net/unreached/1
AFAIK, Japan used to be #1 but their lower birthrate resulted in another Asian country taking the spot. Eyeballing the demographics wiki pages, it switched around 2000.
I did notice the radical dip post WWII. I’m a nerd for that time yet I know so little about the post war political battle that was fought in Japan. What little I do know shocks me. You could say, there was so much that got swept under the rug in light of Japan’s post war economic recovery. The US broke them and reconditioned them based on the American ideals of the time.
Granted, it’s easy to see what was right and wrong when hindsight is 20-20. Let’s not forget the motivation for breaking the Japanese spirit was due to how many atrocities were committed in the Emperor’s name. America did what they had to do to preventing the Japanese from doing something like that again, but it also bore another steep price which we now see today.
God help Japan.
Somehow in all the excitement, everybody forgets that WWII was a nuclear war, and the United States is still the only country to have used atomic weapons on an enemy in wartime.
Yes, I can’t help but notice the “family friendly” (for lack of a better term) pattern in the Japanese media that I’ve seen.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 has a scene where the main party saw a baby for the first time and the girls going gaga over that.
The last Godzilla movie has a romance sideplot about the main character playing house with a girl and the baby that she picked up. And the fact that he had psychological issues stopping him from making that arrangement official was a big plot point.
I doubt all this happen by chance. At the very least there’s some sort feeling in the Japanese psyche that something was wrong with how things are going.
Only some of this is intentional “family propaganda.”
The rest only feels weird because the standard in western fiction has been anti-family in fiction for so long that even Christians have started to think that that’s normal.
Of course girls are going to go gaga over a baby. That’s a normal part of the feminine psyche. The fact that we DON’T regularly see that in western fiction is what is weird.
As per the book Biohistory, once women become free in a society that society and it’s people are doomed to a slow death.
Looks that way.
The worst part is that women overall hate that “freedom”. It’s what men think women should want for the most part. Even the most goth girls I know seem to have a mother hen instinct.
“There’s no sugarcoating it. We broke the Japanese spirit.”
Yup. That in and of itself is a war crime. Of course, we (“we”) did it to ourselves as well. America and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
That’s my major beef with the “America is a Protestant nation!” ‘Murican nationalists. The US ruling class has always been essentially Puritan. They’ve since dumped Christ and the Cross, but therein lay the seeds of Woke-ism.
It turns out that error begets error. Dealing with the Catholic Portuguese didn’t plunge Japan into a national identity crisis. That disaster had to await the arrival of Modernist America.
Target is owned by a family of Pysberterians. They were using the money generated from their chain of discount stores for virtue signaling from Day 1. Back in the day they wouldn’t advertise in papers that also advertised alcohol. Now it’s just “sacrificing” some income so people with mental problems can shop in their stores. I see a lot of Protestants complain about modernism/wokism. However, they never want to renounce the framework that got us here. To add to the fun, they quite often blame the Catholic Church for not preventing today.
The fallout of WWII still affects us all today. It was the death of modernity, yet we try to lie to ourselves that is was a new beginning. It was a beginning, all right: it was the beginning of the end.
The only solution is to final abandon this path. Until we do that, we will only dig ourselves deeper into the grave.
Modernism’s absolute incompatibility with human nature and any kind of society has been proven so many times over that I can’t believe my ears when someone defends “Classical Liberalism” or “Civil Rights”.
Yet decreased neuroplasticity is a hell of a drug. We won’t be rid of the errors of Modernity until the Boomers shuffle off the world stage.
Yes, it seems like change will happen in the next 2 decades. It might not all be for the better either, if we’re talking about standards of living. The cracks have already appeared. Until they become a minority force in the generations, however, we will all still be living in the collective Boomers fever dream of their advanced old age.
It should be extremely telling that out of all the “developed” Asian nations, Japan’s birthrate is above everyone else’s. South Korea is around half of Japans, if not more, with China barely above 1 by any metric that doesn’t depend on the inflated numbers the CCP puts out. Japan’s rate is about on par with the rest of the Western World’s, and has been more or less steady for about 2 decades or so with the rest of the West, while everywhere else is starting to see their birthrates fall off a cliff. Since many of these places are areas that seemed immune to the virus of Modernity at first, think Africa, the Middle East, and such, I am suspecting that there’s an as of yet unidentified variable driving this new drop that has yet to affect the wider Western World.
I think what it comes down to is that after WWII, America imposed its materialist ethos on Japan with none of that pesky, residual spiritual foundation below the surface in the US. It was the imposition of pure Ahriman, sheer materialist impulse. Like you said above, the Japanese spiritual world had been completely broken down to the bedrock with the end of WWII, and it wasn’t Christianity that was laid on top of it, but rather the churning, efficient gears of The Machine.
And I’d argue that this had much earlier roots – when Commodore Perry forced his way into Japan at gunpoint, he didn’t tell the Japanese about how America was a God-fearing nation of devout people with rich and vibrant cultures; he sold them the story of how industrious and rich we were, and were just dying to make money trading with Japan.
When some forward-thinking people in Japan saw the writing on the wall, they wasted no time in completely reforming Japan into Asia’s first industrial powerhouse, determined to be a rich, colonizing nation, emulating the Europeans – essentially, trying to beat Europe to the punch of dominating Asia. Seclusion had worked for a while, but its feasibility was running out; and it was time to re-evaluate, evolve with the times, and emulate “the best.” The Japanese spirit can be cooly pragmatic like that. The spiritual death at the end of WWII was really just the final stage of a process begun decades earlier.
I think there’s also something in the East Asian cultures in general that makes them more susceptible to materialism; I think that’s why there’s low birthrates in China and even Korea as well, despite how supposedly Christian Korea is. Examining the traditional Buddhist and Confucian religion/philosophy of East Asia, it’s rather detached and impersonal compared to Christianity and Islam, for example, which makes me wonder if the vast majority of people in those cultures never quite viewed it as absolute truth, but just a useful system for maintaining social cohesion. As a result, when a more useful and pragmatic system came on the scene, promising the lure of more riches and pleasures… they were perhaps more vulnerable to its lure than the Christian lands, with their more deep-seated convictions about value and truth.
Speaking as someone who lived in Japan for years after a long period of studying the language and culture, my observation is that dopamine reigns supreme. People spend little time thinking about spiritual matters, because they are so distracted by trying to make money, succeed, entertain themselves, accumulate things, and so on. Japanese society features stunningly aspiritual infrastructure that makes considering higher questions feel weird and unnatural. This is also closely tied, I suspect, to the issues of suicide and depression. For the most part, people in Japan literally don’t know how to ask the right questions, let alone answer them. It’s not, of course, because they’re stupid or anything like that; it’s because their cultural paradigm, as it stands, totally obstructs it.
And it sure doesn’t help that the American evangelicalism unsuccessfully imported to Japan contains little if anything that can connect to Japanese sensibilities, which I saw in practice in my time there. Its extreme individualism and idiosyncratically American foundations are completely out of sync with how Japanese think. In several years’ experience as an Orthodox Christian, I’ve often thought about how this is a form of Christianity that would be far more comprehensible to Japanese than the unstructured, emotive free-for-all of evangelicalism.
For all the flak it takes, The Godfather Part III has a memorable scene that your comment called to mind. While conversing with Michael Corleone in a Roman courtyard, the future Pope John Paul I takes a stone out of a fountain basin and cracks it in half. His Eminence points out that while the outside is wet, the inside is bone dry. The water is Christianity, and the stone is Europe; despite being immersed in it for centuries, the faith never fully sank in.
That’s a point I’d debate with Coppola, but based on your account, Europe sounds like a sponge compared to Asia.
Ahh, a fascinating anecdote. Some of it may be timescale; Western Europe has had a far longer exposure to Christianity than Asia has, so one could reasonably argue that with enough time and patience, the Christian way of thinking very well may sink down to the foundations. But of course us humans tend to be impatient, so perhaps it’s tempting to write things off too hastily. Some day the Japanese might be the most Christian people on earth and we’ll all have a good laugh about this. More implausible things have happened, I guess.
Sure I’m biased as Orthodox, but I’d gladly argue that the Slavic lands (and Greek) thoroughly absorbed Christianity. But even that took a very long time and had plenty of ups and down. Actually, for that matter, pre-Norman invasion Anglo Saxon England was a thoroughly Christianized land that produced halls of saints. It’s a fascinating period of British history that tends to get overlooked, probably due to the wealth and influence that would follow centuries later.