People aged 80 and over top 10% of Japan's population for first time
english.kyodonews.net
english.kyodonews.net
I'm just thinking there might be more solutions to consider than "make more children". Automation, robotic assistance, age reversal etc.
Age reversal is interesting. If that happens and everyone can be in their 20's forever, nothing like it. But automation or robots? Close your eyes and imagine a town where the youngest person is 68yo with only robots to take care of the entire town. That scenario seems fucking dystopian to me. YMMV.
If it is going to enter a state of perpetual decline, then it is doomed, full stop.
> There's only so much planet to go around; there's a finite limit somewhere.
Perhaps, but the existence of an asymptote to growth doesn't imply a need to ever switch to decline.
The normal shape of a resource constrained growth curve is logistic.
There's nothing about the types of decline we are seeing that imply they are perpetual. I think these declines are a positive alternative to having decline roman empire style whenever we get too close to a political stalemate in resource allocation.
The types of decline we are seeing are local and temporary and don't require humanity to figure out how to deal with decline at all, because humanity continues growing.
I’m responding to the suggestion of something meaningfully different than what we are seeing.
Also the collapse occurred in parallel with climate change and plague which were responsible for most of the population decline.
If you do not want to pay for your own army you will be paying for someone else's one.
For random peasants the Roman army was as much (if not less) theirs as the those of the barbarians that settled in their lands.
Also the barbarians were often somewhat less exploitative and most of the tax money stayed in the local area instead off being shipped of to Rome/Constantinople
But what type of people? Are they dependents (old, children, disabled) or independent ones who can support the rest of the society? If the ratio of workers : dependents gets unhealthy, a society is doomed. In spite of all the technological progress, we still need humans for a lot of things - long term care, food, entertainment, security etc. If there are no young people, who is going to do all that?
> The largest dangers to Japanese society lie in the transition period, where many elderly people will need to be supported by relatively fewer working age people.
You answered your own question.
In a lot of countries the working population pays the pensions, more pensioners and less workers = more stress on the workers. In the long run it's good but it's going to suck ass for a few generations
And that's not even talking about the logistic of taking care of elders, it gets either very expensive or very time consuming, or both. For example in France it costs about $3k a month to have a small room in a shitty retirement house that is already overcrowded and understaffed
my grandmother had Alzheimer's and her care, in rural WA, was around $9000/month USD. Reasonably new building but still pretty understaffed.
More than anything else, THIS is what I think will ultimately kick off a housing crash. These “retirement” prices are clearly designed to squeeze the Boomers of their housing equity.
Japan's resource is its people. Engineers, teachers, government officers, train conductors, and so on. When population declines, the Japanese don't have more resources per people. They just have less resources, period.
Will it ultimate entail a slow rise or will it spiral further down?
If I were to be an armchair prime Minister, beyond focusing on class inequality, social and cultural norms there's one radical immigration policy I would toy around with giving international amnesty to orphans around the world.
And placing them either in foster care or in a highly coordinated communinitarian community (essentially everythingfrom social workers, teachers, police to young and old people in a district/city would be tasked with raising these kids).
While it could backfire or lead to abuse, if run properly and it works it should be a huge win-win for both the orphan and the country (since adopted kids should have a higher likelihood of being fully integrated), but given japan does have a very strong attitude of "gaijin vs watashitachi-jin" i.e. anyone who's not japanese or japanese looking is a foreigner and no matter how hard you try you will never be a true japanese person.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_consumption_by_count...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_ex...
When the boomer generation retires many countries will have to face similar problems and many western nations are already essentially governed by people that would/should be retired and can't find it in their hearts to give the levers of power to all the generations that came after them.
As a young person who will have to support an aging population I wondered half my life why the generations before me went just YOLO on the population pyramid thing as if it wasn't mathematically predictable what the outcome would be.
Then the pandemic hit and it turned out to be mathematically predictable as well and I got a display of just how irrelevant that fact was. It doesn't matter if the outcome is preventable. If you think it won't affect you and tou don't care about everybody else.
I think that's true, but only in a restricted sence - the Anglosphere countries and swathes of Western Europe (plus some others) are some of the most immigration-friendly countrie sin the world; Japan (and the rest of East Asia) is not.
> many western nations are already essentially governed by people that would/should be retired
This is surpringly a mainly US phenomenon: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/03/24/who-are-t...
Japan of today is nothing like Japan of 100 years ago.
Every nation has already faded away multiple times.
Yes and no. It is one thing where that ship is uses immigration as a source of "replacement parts", and another thing when it doesn't. The immigration method replaces old parts of the ship with different kinds of parts, the non-immigration method replaces old parts with just more modern/slightly different versions of the same parts.
US and the likes are absolutely a ship of theseus in my book, but Japan doesn't feel like it would be the same "kind" of a ship of theseus, given how ethnically homogenous and anti-immigration it is.
Disclaimer: I am not trying to argue here for which approach is "better" (considering that one approach being objectively better than the other in absolute terms is probably not even a thing). Gotta keep in mind that the originally immigrant-based ship that is the US isn't the same as the heavily homogenous ship that is Japan at all. Frankly, I don't know the answer to this, and neither was that the point of my reply. I just don't want the comment section to devolve into arguing which is better (immigration-based ship of theseus vs. a ship that is not affected by immigration almost at all). My original point was that "not all ships of theseus are the same kind", so one approach would likely not work the same way when applied to two radically different types of a ship.
Like how japan like most of Asia is so fixated on materialism with even marriage still being heavily influenced by it (hence why theres a lot of dysfunctional marriages in japan).
Things are changing policy-wise to make it easier to raise a family. They're moving fast in that regard and I've witnessed many of these changes firsthand since becoming a father, especially where paternity leave and childcare payments are concerned.
Impossible.
"sophisticated set of shared rules and norms" - I don't know what that's supposed to mean. I definitely get a bad feeling from a sentence like that though.
Why?!
2) If anything, "a [..] set of shared rules and norms" sounds like an environment which tries to enforce a strict template for how to behave and act and do. If that's really the case then it to me would be a terrible place to be. Like that backwater isolated village with some snooping crones keeping an eye on everything.
If you meant something totally different, please explain. Particularly the "sophisticated" point.
The rules and norms are complex and encompass a wider and deeper range of behaviors.
> 2) If anything, "a [..] set of shared rules and norms" sounds like an environment which tries to enforce a strict template for how to behave and act and do. If that's really the case then it to me would be a terrible place to be.
Anti-social people don’t like it, to be sure. But it facilitates high trust societies that have lower social transaction costs. Paradoxically, it enables societies that have less formal policing and rule enforcement, because of the high level of informal policing and rule enforcement.
I would like to see a more specific example of what you mean by sophisticated rules and norms. What would a real-life example be? I still don't get it, so I would be happy to learn what you mean by this.
The unsubtle explanation from someone who is not a huge Singapore fan (or from someone who is?) might be that this is simply the power of well-engineered, highly authoritarian government. But it's certainly not about choosing homogeneity or eschewing immigration.
This didn't jibe so I looked up the figures and I still don't understand why you'd write this. To be honest I don't understand why you've written most of what you've written on this thread, but, did you mean to write "ignoring religious diversity...?" The US is 63% Christian. The largest religious group in Singapore is the Buddhists, at... 31%? And unlike in the United States, two minority groups in Singapore (Christians, Muslims) have strong representation in the population, whereas in the US, not so much.
Which I guess would leave things like language, of which they have four official ones and quite a few others, with a bilingual education mandate that demands everyone learn English but recognizes that they've probably got their own as well, IIRC.
There's racial makeup, if that matters to you (I get the feeling it does). In terms of cultural dominance I would reject the idea that there's something massively different about a 69% white majority vs a 74% Chinese majority. The second on their list is Malay at 13.5% and the second on our list is Black at 12.4% and my God why are we even having this conversation
I'm pretty sure the explanation for the undeniable order there is the completely obvious explanation that does not involve "homogeneity" or immigration. It's the authoritarian system of government.
And yes the homogeneity helps Singapore’s orderliness. The overwhelming majority of the population is Asian, who in general are more collectivist and orderly than say Italians.
I definitely don't have any feeling of loss of culture, I guess that's my point.
How many individuals from those ethnic backgrounds might actually want to emigrate to Japan, I don't know.
Also, there a lot of ethnic Chinese people in Australia who are actually from Malaysia or Singapore; Malaysian Chinese want to escape the discrimination of Malaysia's Bumiputera policy; many Singaporeans want an escape from Singapore's cramped living conditions (small apartments). So ethnic Chinese immigrants can be sources from places other than China proper.
South Korea and Japan do have difficult relations, and they have been getting worse. But I remember visiting South Korea some years ago and talking to some of my South Korean colleagues about how they felt about Japan, and what I noticed was wide differences in opinion – some were still very angry at Japan for things it had done long before they were born, others were critical of their fellow Koreans' anti-Japanese sentiments. I suspect some of this is political – historically, many Koreans collaborated with Japan, among others Park Chung Hee, who served in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, and then became South Korea's military dictator in the 1960s and 1970s. Some right-wing South Koreans still have some sympathy for the 1960s/1970s military dictatorship, and hence tend to view collaborators with Japan more sympathetically; more left-leaning South Koreans are highly critical of both.
In any event, there are a lot of things which Japan could say to try to assuage South Korean feelings on these topics. Japan's problem is that saying those things would upset Japan's own nationalist bloc. But if Japan really wants to attract Korean immigrants, maybe upsetting their own nationalists is the price of that.
a) the fact that Japan's birthrate is below the number needed to sustain the current population
b) the fact that Japan is ethnically homogenous (98.5% ethnically Japanese), and has very limited channels for immigration, meaning that japan, with the policies that exist today, will not be able to significantly mitigate the population decline by accepting immigrants.
Japan takes a very different approach compared to countries like Canada, which is a melting pot of cultures and which has an increasing population largely due to immigration
Australia's immigration rate, on a per capita basis, is more than double that of the US, and somewhat ahead of Canada's. [0] It has a lower total fertility rate [1] than the US (1.73 for Australia vs 1.84 for US), but still a higher TFR than Canada (1.57), and I suspect having double the immigration rate is probably going to make up for the somewhat lower fertility. And I think you are missing more countries than just Australia.
While in absolute terms, the US accepts more immigrants than any other country in the world, on a per capita basis, its net immigration rate isn't particularly high, and is below that of many Western European countries.
Likewise, US total fertility, while high by Western standards, is not the highest in the Western world; France is significantly higher at 2.02; Ireland and Iceland also beat the US at fertility, and Norway is only just behind the US.
[0] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/net-migration-r...
[1] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/total-fertility...
Slated to decline according to whom? According to the most recent projections published by Australia's national statistics agency, [0] Australia's population is projected to continuously increase through 2066, ending up at somewhere between 37 and 49 million (compared to around 26 million today). The only projection of theirs according to which it will decline is the highly unrealistic "zero net migration" scenario.
[0] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/populati...
So Japan's policy is not unreasonable. You can become a proper Japanese if you want to (are willing to culturally integrate), it's just that not many people do. Without it you'd be trading off death of country for death of culture. Contrast to China or Thailand where AFAIK you are always second class citizen legally if you are "wrong" ethnicity.
I'm really not sure about that. I'm a white man with red hair, I'm pretty sure I'd always be "otherized" in Japan, as would most westerners.
The question is legal equality, which seems possible and not depend on color of your hair.
Of course some Japanese will treat you differently. They will also otherize and treat differently even their fellow ethnic Japanese of other social classes. But I think this is not really different from British, Russian or many other cultures (maybe except US or Canada which are more melting pot like). It's just harder to notice from inside the culture.
japanese nationality is tied to ethnicity so much due to how homogenous the society is
so legally for a foreigner the policy seems reasonable, just there is a lot of FUD spread by people who felt entitled to become Japanese with little effort and suffered reality check, see eg. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj855k5066o
Modern Japanese culture has its roots almost entirely in the 19th century and the post WW2 era.
You might as well say that US culture has its roots in ancient Greece or Rome, or Reformation age Europe and claim it’s hundreds or even thousands years old. It would be worth about as much.
But yeah I agree with you in the sense that US/Canada are constantly affected by a constant influx of people belonging to different cultures.
Had there been barely any immigration after ~1800 American culture would be effectively as old and unique as the Japanese one. Quebec for instance is kind of (but not quite) like that.
> just there's objectively less to worry about not ruining something age old and unique.
Well they already did during the Meiji period and subsequently, what remains is not that significant.
Also what are your thoughts on Britain, Scandinavian and some other European countries? They would be effectively no different to Japan in this sense besides the fact that they have very large numbers immigrants.
No. Greeks, Romans, Vikings, Slavs, Turks, Arabs, Mongols etc, different peoples have their respective roots for sure, but those roots are elsewhere. Once you move across the ocean and mingle with a bunch of others coming from radically different backgrounds and histories, different mutually unintelligible languages and incompatible religions it's a completely different story than if you live at the same locality, speak the same language and carry broadly similar values and beliefs as N generations and thousands of years back. Except for first nations, people of US and Canada are still very much guests on their soil if you compare those timescales (actually even first nations may have settled Canada a bit later than Japanese settled Japan by skimming Wikipedia but that I'm not sure). From inside one of those new cultures (who are cool and unique in their own ways, sure) it can be easy to miss the significance.
> From inside one of those new cultures (who are cool and unique in their own ways, sure) it can be easy to miss the significance.
A lot of assumptions.. I live in Europe and belong to supposedly one of the fairly ancient cultures according to this definition. It doesn’t seem any less silly to me because of that.
Unless Japan is supposedly exceptionally special somehow in that regard? I don’t think it is, most unique things about its culture have their roots in the 19th or 20th century (just like European countries or the US).
> Japanese settled Japan by skimming Wikipedia but that I'm not sure
The Ainu might have. The settlers/invaders from China or Korea whose culture later developed into what we know as Japan only began arriving in the archipelago around 300 BC (so less ancient than the Greeks or Romans). Also much closer to the establishment of US than to first nation people migrating into the Americas.