Let me make it simple.
You can't raise a fucking family if all you're doing is barely surviving.
this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
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Japan before WWII
- high infant and child mortality
- shorter life expectancy
- many people didn’t live to old age
- there was population growth, but it was slower and much younger
So:
→ lots of children
→ many young adults
→ few elderly
**Japan after WWII
**
→ baby boom
→ improved healthcare
- better nutrition
- rising prosperity
- vaccinations
- medical technology Japan becomes world champion in life expectancy (over 80 years on average).
→ Japan gives women more freedom to study and work. But… the system around family, work, and care barely changes.
- women can pursue careers
- but the country still expects women to:
- run the household
- raise children
- often care for in-laws
- and employers still expect:
- extremely long working hours
- almost no flexible schedules
- full-time loyalty to the company
→ Conclusion: children are discouraged
Fertility collapses + a huge adult generation (from the baby boom) From the 1970s onward, the birth rate drops dramatically due to:
- career-focused culture
- high cost of living
- marrying later
- limited childcare
- women working + conservative family structure
→ Japan falls to about 1.2 children per woman → structural population decline.
Lessons / Conclusion: Japan shows what happens when you don’t make structural changes for a long time. Too few workers + too many elderly = shortages of labor, money, and care.
Solutions
- More children (slow solution) Birth rates usually don’t fall because people don’t want kids, but because:
- housing is too expensive
- work and family are hard to combine
- childcare isn’t well organized
- there’s too little socioeconomic security
Countries like France and the Scandinavian nations do better:
- affordable childcare
- parental leave
- flexible work
- stable housing certainty
Result: higher birth rates than Japan, Italy, Spain, and formerly Germany. If you want a “younger” society → invest structurally in good family life.
- Raising the retirement age (helps a bit)
- Robots and automation (already implemented by Japan)
- Immigration / controlled immigration (the fastest solution)
Without immigration → extreme population decline and extreme aging.
In Europe: immigration + integration makes aging far less severe.
Japan can insist “we don’t want immigration,” “we are homogeneous,” “we’ll manage through discipline,” but eventually this collides with simple math. If we want to preserve our way of life, we have to take demographic reality seriously, with better childcare, higher productivity, and controlled immigration.
If Japan capped working at 28 hours a week and anything after that required double the pay (for overtime), this problem would taken care of.
Working all the time makes people miserable. It's an externality that impacts society in all sorts of horrible ways. It would be proper for the government to institute a rule like this.
It would definitely lower GDP of Japan and cause some economic issues, but the alternative (living in a world where people are so miserable that they don't fall in love as much and want to reproduce) is worse for their economy.
Will they do this? No, because it would require thinking outside of the box too much and would be seen as too extreme.
Yup. It is so weird to me how little the destroyed work-life-balance is mentioned whenever declining birth rates are discussed (not only in Japan).
They don't even have to pay overtime for work over 28 hours. If they just paid overtime for the actual or time work that is done, that would make an enormous difference. When I worked in Japan (25 years ago, but I have read/heard nothing to suggest that the situation has changed), it was normal for people to work 60 or 70 hours, but not claim any overtime.
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Where my phone placed the new line was truly a rollercoaster:
Japan's Birth Rate Set to Break Even
Wow, breaking even? Finally looking up for japan!
... the Bleakest Forecasts
Oh no.
I don't see the problem. What's the problem here? How is this bleak, except for the linegoup?
More babies is just more people later. I don't know that we need fewer, but we certainly don't need more.
I said the same thing but used the word race and the whole forum bashed me for being a "Nazi." I swear sometimes I think the bots have already taken over Lemmy.
Might be worse than that.
Old people unable to find caregivers and dying alone, often many years younger than they would with basic care. In isolation, I do find countrywide systemic elder neglect to be a pretty big negative. I am old enough my future need for care is starting to feel pretty real, and I really appreciate having enough nieces and nephews to have decent odds of support.
In Japan's specific case, there are large numbers of people in nearby countries that would jump at the chance to immigrate and work in elder care, but most Japanese are so racist they would rather die alone and early. So, I guess leave them to it.
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Japan does not get enough hate for being a racist anti-immigrant conservative hell hole.
Wow, we're lucky this whole AI thing will fix everything if we just give some tech bros a few more trillion dollars
You can't complain about a birthrate crisis when the world is full of immigrants and there is a domestic cost of living crisis unless you are a eugenicist on some level.
Throwing rocks from the glass house that is the US I know
Japan is super racist despite the polite facade. It also doesn’t help that they have a “work and drink yourself to death at the expense of having a life” culture.
America certainly does similar things, but we don’t bother polishing the turd with politeness.
It also doesn’t help that they have a “work and drink yourself to death at the expense of having a life” culture.
Americans, on average, work more hours per year than Japanese people (1765 vs 1691). Per capita alcohol consumption is also higher in the US than it is in Japan.
It was different in the 80s, but that's now it is now.
Doesn’t really change what I said? Just because we drink more and work more doesn’t mean what I said isn’t happening.
https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/karoshi-deep-look-japans-unforgiving-working-culture
The difference is in the US we probably do it because we get paid poorly and are stressed out due to societal and economic reasons. So we work a lot and become alcoholics because stress, advertising, whatever.
In Japan, it’s expected you work a lot and drink with the boss.
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I remember living it in Mexico like a free soul as a kid. We had poor people but I think I never really saw homeless people. Even the poorest person I knew had a little house where he lived with a few donkeys. We called him Toño La Muerte because his eyes were deep into his very thin looking skull eye sockets. He also lived right outside of the city pantheon. His little house burnt down once and besides the time my father died I can't remember having such a sinking feeling. Anyway his house was promptly rebuilt With community help. We didn't just let Toñito die out in despair having nothing. Anyway, now things are bleak for all kids out there. How can they ever dream of owning a place to live? And so if you can only focus on that problem, there's no room for the having kids problem. Its simple, you got no place to live so bring no kids until you do. Okay so let's say 50 year old men can finally afford a house so they start courting 20 year old women. That's a big gap. Maybe their sperm is not great. But then it also means that they are easily outcompeting young men for women who can have kids. Ofcourse for women this all means that they can't have a future of their own. They live so they can make bsbies with 50 year old men shooting blanks. Some of this might be true. My wife and I are similar age and married close to our 40's. We knew we had to make some babies asap or we would miss that chance. 5 years and you're done. Once women hit 40, its very hard to be pregnant. Having kids within 5 years is a lot of pressure.
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Amazing how the people in positions to have kids are screaming at the top of their lungs what would help the situation and the geritocracy just ignores them and has the fucking nerve to whine about low birth rates.
Wipe your own asses boomers, we're done propping up this dead society
I love that people who just second before told me they DO NOT CARE about my future (bc of climate change), try to force me to have kids because I supposedly SHOULD care about their future lmao
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Another stupid article assuming that a population reduction is a bad thing.
No, no, of course, just keep increasing the human population until it crashes. Then it'll be an actual problem.
The numbers look bad because increasing population increases the GDP, and GDP has become the archetypal example of what happens when you turn a metric into a goal.
It's not just about GDP, if your retired population starts to outnumber your working population by a large amount, who will support all those old people? Nowadays children can't care for their parents because they have to go to their 9-5 every day, so we rely on other people to do that job for us, and if they disappear then what? The problem isn't the deflating population per se, it's the inverted demographic pyramid and our work culture
The problem is made up. We're more productive than ever and should have plenty of leisure time and plenty of safety nets for old age....but that wealth has all been siphoned off by a very few. The solution to this is tax the wealthy.
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This is the average amount of monthly hours (male/female)worked since 2013, i do not see an honest effort to help the population growth.
Source: https://www.e-stat.go.jp/en/
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The "economy" can go fuck itself.
What matters is the resources available per person, and naturally you would expect that to go up when there's fewer children.
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