Japan’s population drops by half a million in 2022
cnn.com
cnn.com
There was a period where I was strongly interested in going to Japan and potentially starting a life there, despite what I'd heard about their work culture and social issues, but even still found it almost impossible due to their prohibitive immigration restrictions. This put me off it entirely, and I doubt I'm the only one.
Not to be rude but it seems like the Japanese government would do well to be a little bit humbled by what's going on and start trying to appeal more to the people and to foreigners so they can start to restore their country. Instead they just seem to be subbornly plowing head first off the cliff. Not to say the USA is much different.
No nuance.
Nearly 45.3 million immigrants lived in the United States in 2021, the most since census records have been kept. In 2021, immigrants comprised 13.6 percent of the total U.S. population, a figure that remains short of the record high of 14.8 percent in 1890
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested...
Japan is ~2%
In 2021, approximately 2.76 million residents of foreign nationality were registered in Japan, making up about 2.2 percent of the population.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/687809/japan-foreign-res...
And while I do believe that having a more open immigration policy may be beneficial (it's practically the cheat code for declining populations), I genuinely believe they would do much more if they focused on strengthening their social safety net (unemployment, parental leaves), cracking down on the toxic work cultures (much more aggressively, not in the current way, where they favor employers over employees and use social shame for everything, although that's Japanese culture in a sense ...), and making family minded policies (massive tax breaks or direct aid for children)
Japan has the most open immigration policy in the world for skilled workers. But it's a hard place to immigrate to because of the language barrier.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/230322/dq230...
over 1 million in a single year, thats like if 8.5 million just showed up in the US creating a new New York.
[1] Israel has been in a constant baby boom since independence, with the highest fertility rate in the OECD at 3.1 children per woman. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boom#Israel
> known reliable way solution that generalizes
Why all these qualifiers? It doesn't have to be reliable or general - individual countries can each have their own approach, that only works after lots of tweaking, and even just intermittently, as long as it time-averages to replacement level. And it won't become known unless we look for it - more than the occasional sporadic attempt by a government that gets decried as racist and sexist for their efforts [1].
> exactly like Israel
Why "exactly"? If someone pointed to Japan when searching for solutions to reduce heart disease or medical costs in the US, would you also say "become exactly like Japan" isn't an option? Many countries similar to Israel have low fertility, while many very dissimilar ones have high fertility. Clearly, being exactly like Israel isn't necessary.
[1] 'Baby machines': eastern Europe's answer to depopulation - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/04/baby-bonuses-f...
That sounds like an unending series of demographic shocks and may well be worse than the original problem.
You think everyone should become a bunch of religious nuts? That's not something that's exactly easy to instill in a population; it takes generations. It also usually results in a lot of bad things: oppression of women and minorities, warmongering, etc.
Religion and fertility may be correlated, but it's demonstrably not an unbreakable rule, and outliers abound, so we shouldn't just give up. Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_irreligio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
If anything, the xenophobic narrative is that the immigrants are too rich, driving up housing prices in Vancouver and Toronto.
And they are driving up housing prices. New arrivals to Canada aren't moving to SK, or MB -- most of them aren't from cold countries and stay entirely in the southern most cities -- the GTA and VAN, and to a far lesser extent, Calgary and Edmonton.
How can they be terrified of change, when their economy is at the cutting edge of several fields, and the dramatic changes of automation that they embraced and developed?
Or do you mean that there is one particular sort of change they don't want? The way that, say, environmentalists are "terrified of change" when they oppose climate change and deforestation?
> their government
Just their government? The Japanese people themselves demand mass immigration?
It's obvious that there's a distinction between technological change and social/cultural change.
Japanese strike me as very conservative when it comes to social/cultural shifts. Compare it to Taiwan, for example, and there is a big difference (to be fair, Taiwan probably has less cultural history to begin with).
Yet they refuse to change some social/cultural values. What makes this a phobia worth pathologizing, instead of a legitimate preference deserving of respect?
For example, when Kashmir decried being stripped of autonomy [1], were they also just being phobic and terrified of change?
[1] Kashmir’s new status could bring demographic change, drawing comparisons to the West Bank - https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/08/08/kashmirs-new...
As far as I can tell, folks are just commenting on how this affects their demographics and ability to scale social services in the coming decades as their tax base shrinks. That's a real problem.
I don't see how you read any other intent.
In general, "xenophobia" is a frequent accusation against those that don't want mass immigration.
"If you're scared, negative, or don't love something -- you're wrong!" NPC's are tiresome. It would be nice to peacefully separate from them into different states... they can do their nonsense over there in their own state.
A country is not a place on the map. It is the people themselves. If you replace the people with another people you have destroyed the country.
Anyway, long term, Japan would be better off with a smaller population.
Not so. Countries and people are absolutely free to decide how much immigration they want to allow, if at all.
Honestly, the place is doing great. No restoration necessary. I don't see how it would be any better by making immigration easier, it would only lower the cultural and social cohesion of a very insular place.
This is a bizarre consequence of capitalism, this expectation of infinite growth and an infinite supply of labor. Preferably cheap labor.
If you consider historical precedent I don't think you can blame them for that.
> Japan should become the west.
Leave people alone... let them live how they want. (You be liberal / tolerant).
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/09/1065135/japan-au...
> Why haven’t they taken off? The answer tells us something about the limitations of techno-solutionism and the urgent need to rethink our approach to care.
> Japan has been developing robots to care for older people for over two decades, with public and private investment accelerating markedly in the 2010s. By 2018, the national government alone had spent well in excess of $300 million funding research and development for such devices. At first glance, the reason for racing to roboticize care may seem obvious. Almost any news article, presentation, or academic paper on the subject is prefaced by an array of anxiety-inducing facts and figures about Japan’s aging population: birth rates are below replacement levels, the population has started to shrink, and though in 2000 there were about four working-age adults for every person over 65, by 2050 the two groups will be near parity. The number of older people requiring care is increasing rapidly, as is the cost of caring for them. At the same time, the already large shortage of care workers is expected to get much worse over the next decade. There’s little doubt that many people in Japan see robots as a way to fill in for these missing workers without paying higher wages or confronting difficult questions about importing cheap immigrant labor, which successive conservative Japanese governments have tried to curtail.
---
> ...
> Care crises aren’t the natural or inevitable result of demographic aging. Instead, they are the result of specific political and economic choices.
> In short, the machines failed to save labor. The care robots themselves required care: they had to be moved around, maintained, cleaned, booted up, operated, repeatedly explained to residents, constantly monitored during use, and stored away afterwards. Indeed, a growing body of evidence from other studies is finding that robots tend to end up creating more work for caregivers.
---
I want to say that the approach that they're looking to do with robots replacing humans rather than augmenting humans is an approach that is going to be problematic.
On top of this is the dignity angle. I suspect many would prefer to be capable of bathing and dressing themselves rather than needing to rely on a caregiver.
Refusing to automate the "human" parts of healthcare will do nothing but kill people due to delayed or expensive care. Imagine a world where everyone had a doctor with all current medical knowledge available 24/7!
However: seeing an "AI" (you think this will end with chatbots?) >>>>>>>>>> not seeing a real person
People talk about “moonshots” but the Apollo program was 4.4% of the federal budget in 1966 the modern equivalent would be ~200-300 Billion dollars per year. Not that Japan needs to invest that kind of money, but it shows how much it was prioritized.
Allow me to throw my hat in the ring. How do you feel about localized food production? I am a proponent of people producing more of their own food, this reduces both transportation costs and pollution.
Considering AGI and automation, this would free people up to return to the land more and produce more of their own food. Which is more sustainable.
Of course implementation details would need to be worked out.
- producing food takes space (preferrably arable land, though a larger plot of pasturable land will also work).
- producing food takes time (taking care of crops or animals takes a significant amount of time, which is time people can't spend on salaried work).
- producing food takes knowledge (knowing which crops to plant, when to plant them, how to properly care for them, and when to harvest them, for example).
Aside from those three problems and, where applicable, the problem of needing water (I hear some place called California tends to have problems with that) I can't see any notable issues with that idea.
There sure are a lot of green lawns in California, maybe we can start replacing them with gardens.
>- producing food takes time (taking care of crops or animals takes a significant amount of time, which is time people can't spend on salaried work).
Automation seems to be taking care of that issue, if gradually.
>producing food takes knowledge (knowing which crops to plant, when to plant them, how to properly care for them, and when to harvest them, for example).
ChatGPT and other educational tools can take care of that.
> producing food takes space (preferrably arable land, though a larger plot of pasturable land will also work).
We would be able to justify single family residences more if the yards were used to grow food, and keep chickens. Added benefit of reducing kitchen waste to near 0.
https://japantoday.com/category/features/kuchikomi/japan's-f...
Most people are leaving rural japan to find more than subsistence as I would imagine many people on this platform have left one place or another to find means that ideally outstrip their needs and allow them to save for the future.
Japan has a serious depopulation problem and is the first country to tip into negative population growth without much policy change to soften it.
The results are not good. They are things like:
- not being able to move out of your parents house
- not being able to have kids
- old people starving to death
-limited food production, limited social services (where's the tax base), greater divides between density and rural life
Like others mention Japan needs to have leadership that is not xenophobic and begin to embrace policies that encourage family growth including supporting women who work rather than continuing to build on female invisible labor at home and a salaryman effort in the public sphere.
The problem is, of course, that immigration turns it into a tragedy of the commons: Population A won't reduce their birth-rate, if that just means population B will take their place, and the strain on their local environment won't be reduced:
Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-...
Europe needs immigrants, young and committed and eager to learn. They are the future taxpayers who will support an ageing population - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/12/the-gu...
People who have never trained a neural network nor attempted to model the weather or any large system might be inclined to believe current climate modeling. Unfortunately we lack the data to do so with any precision or accuracy. And I'm not convinced by someone yelling at me to trust experts. I can reason well enough on my own to know that we lack the data to know if humans are causing global climate changes or if these are just natural progressions.
In other words I am suspicious of the motives of the people pushing the agenda. And they have done little to allay my fears, instead it seems to be increasingly militant in their rhetoric.
And I don't believe for a minute that the people advocating that we reduce our standard of living intend on sharing in that reduction. I think they are hypocrites.
When I see them raising their own animals or having a garden then I might believe them. Instead they try to tell me that we should eat bugs instead of raising chickens, despite chickens being more palatable and emitters of 0 green house gasses compared to insects at 2g/kg.[1] Chickens also eat kitchen waste. We don't have kitchen waste at my house.
If they instead advocated for things like that, things that make sense and have a tangible benefit today, they would have more credibility. Not to mention the mental health benefits of returning to the earth and being closer to nature.
Instead they come up with these half baked authoritarian notions and seem intent on ramming them through. 15 minute cities, eating bugs, and owning nothing. zero emissions. no gas powered engines. and on and on it goes. Qui bono?
Just taking things away and providing no real solutions. Battery powered earth moving/farming equipment is not feasible, for example.
I don't take kindly to being ruled by people with less sense than I have, who refuse to include the very "stakeholders" that they are making decisions for. And who use force to impose their will.
[1]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/good-grub-why-we-migh...
Isn't the danger is that there are not enough workers to aide an aging population at the same time there aren't enough consumers to feed growth and manufacturing changes that designed to turn out vast quantities of goods?
A labor/consumption imbalance. It would seem that we would need to make our manufacturing more elastic, retooling existing factories to be more dynamic in what and how they produce goods. Would be a good thing in general.
Even just to bring up the material standards of living for the global poor to match developed world conditions will need more people, not less. I can't in good conscience say that we have peaked as a species now and need to start declining.
Don't let your goal of "fully automated luxury gay space communism" force your risk curve into oblivion.
Btw, are you a new parent? That tends to color things imo, you notice a lot more babies than otherwise.
It's not that I don't see them other places, but it was a lot more concentration there and then... and that was memorable.
If you are a tourist, you're likely to be in the more aesthetically pleasing areas or commercial areas and during the work week.
The counter example would be if you were in a small town an hour beyond the outskirts of the larger cities and went to a local restaurant for dinner - the age demographics would be quite different.
One of my taxi drivers look so elderly I dared not let him even touch any of my bags …
Of course, this isn't really that unusual in developed nations, but it's more pronounced here.
On the plus side, Tokyo is a really great place to raise a family unlike American cities, because it's safe and walkable. Your kids can ride a bike, or take a subway, by themselves if you want, and not have to worry much about safety.
There was even a riot in 1973 that broke out by train commuters who were enraged that they couldn’t get to work due to striking train workers back when the JR system was nationalized:
Simply put, most people past a particular age are going to have reduced economic output due to frail bodies and weak minds.
Pensions are used by corporations to keep their spend and employee population predictable. It's lovely when it works out for the employee but its not the primary goal. I would debate whether its a luxury when you've locked yourself out of market growth in the hopes of a soft landing when older.
Also "If someone is fit and healthy" is far more than a series of personal decisions and age catches up with you fast. Once you also combine with that the changes in tech, and in the workplace in general, you'll see fewer and fewer options for that luxury pension
We have
- a serious mismanagement of resources via a nat'l resources deficit: https://www.activesustainability.com/environment/natural-res...
- a horrible distribution of food globally (as an example, the US wastes 40% of its food: https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs)
- more than enough land to go around.
In the words of Ludwig von Mises, "If the tailor goes to war against the baker, he must henceforth bake his own bread."
Society can maintain a balance in this way without population restriction. Greater population grants us the luxury of more specializations and ideally more free time and more comforts.
Even without my reasons, "you are wrong" suffices because the onus is on you to provide proof of an assertion, otherwise it's false by default. Providing proof of a negative is nonsense.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/69/Ja...