One in 10 Japanese Now Aged over 80, Population Report Shows

Considering that men die a bit earlier, at this point this man is looking for a nurse, not a girlfriend...

South Korea is Japan on speedrun lol.

So does America. It's called "The American Dream."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_a_Salesman

We solve it with immigration currently.

Yeah, I follow a few YouTube channels where they bought (or rented very cheaply) a Japanese farm house in a rural part of the country.

capital is seeking safe havens; all of the Commonwealth countries too, I hear

Hope? If housing prices decline in the US the way they have in Japan it's going to completely change… everything, and not in a good way. Housing is the primary savings vehicle in the US. Almost everyone relies on values increasing in perpetuity. If housing prices dramatically fall the poverty rate among the elderly is going to go absolutely bananas.

Replacing?

Africans wouldn't be heading to japan anyway.

It is a bandaid sure but it's a bandaid worth literally decades of time. There's a reason doctors put bandaids on wounds.

It's kind of too late anyway.

What are they replacing anyway?

Genetics? The US is literally a nation born out of immigration and any "racial distinctiveness" in Europe has more to do with the limited means of transport leading to geographical inbreeding than some metaphysical legacy of pure bloodlines. Not to mention that most of Europe experienced various migration waves all the way back to the first migrations that resulted in Europe being settled by humans at all. Japan has been trying to keep up its strategy of just being extremely racist post-WW2 and it doesn't look like that got them anywhere.

Culture? You literally can't look at most nations' cultures without also considering the cultures of their neighbors that influenced them. As much as ethnonationalists like to pretend otherwise, for any continental culture the grouping of what aspects are specific to that "nation" have more to do with its history of government than any shared identity. Germany for example was barely a coherent concept before the 19th century. Japan being forced to spend most of its history navelgazing and sitting on its thumbs because it consisted of a bunch of islands doesn't make its culture any more special or worth preserving than any other and most of what you imagine when you think of Japan today is the result of being repeatedly carpet bombed and literally nuked after trying to do an imperialism to the point of voluntarily acting as a vassal to its victor: Westernization had less to do with immigration and more with global trade and trying to cargo cult the nation that wiped the proverbial floor with it.

Heck, the only example I can think of literal replacement is far-right Israeli settlers moving into houses of Palestinian families after their expulsion without even giving them enough time to clear out the fridge. That's literally replacement: residents of one culture and ethnicity are forcibly removed from their own homes and replaced with residents of another. But again, that's not what's happening with immigration and it's not what you're complaining about.

If you're truly concerned with a loss of culture and every distinctiveness being washed over until all that remains is a homogeneous grey soup Disney can fill in a tin and sell to you, the problem isn't immigration but commodification and tourism. Instead of dishonestly grandstanding about native Americans you should be looking at Hawai'i where Americans bluntly annexed the kingdom, cut up the land to sell it off to American hoteliers and the very rich, and then sold off cheap immitations of the native culture so middle-class tourists could have an "exotic" experience as a piece of escapism.

Forget about "national identities". Places used to have identities. Every city, every town used to have a distinguishing character that was the result of its geography and history, like the rings of a tree telling the story of past seasons. Then big box chains stomped out the local businesses and undercut the competition by making it up in volume before ramping up prices again once noone else was left. And with nobody left to perpetuate the culture now that the only means of production was commerce and commerce was owned by the same big companies, all that is left is the same, market researched, focus group tested, mass produced, grey soup that is served everywhere. At best you can hope your local history is interesting enough that Disney picks it up as a novelty so it can use it as the backdrop for its umpteenth retelling of a story some dead guy wrote before copyright became a thing.

You don't seem to genuinely worry about losing culture. It sounds more like you just don't like "foreigners" to live around you. If you are truly concerned about loss of culture, look at preservationist projects. There are for example linguists who go out to communities in Europe who speak endangered languages so they can be recorded and studied. There are people who form activist groups to get local sites on the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites so it becomes easier to find funding to maintain them. There are groups who learn and teach endangered arts or crafts so the knowledge isn't lost when a profession is no longer deemed economically useful. There are people who use spare rooms to run donation-funded private museums to preserve local history.

But here's the thing: culture changes and evolves over time, especially at the intersection. Life isn't static and neither is history. If you demand that immigrants "assimilate" you are literally asking them to give up their culture to preserve some kind of shrinkwrapped carbon copy of what you think yours is. But even if left to its own devices, your culture would change over time. What happens with immigration is not replacement of culture but a merger. Culture is a river, not a pond. No matter how much commodification tries to tell you otherwise by trying to sell it to you in a bucket.

The idea that of home as a fiscal vehicle needs to die. Homes should be treated much closer to cars: as depreciating liabilities. Land on the other hand...

If you buy a house to live in it, you lose nothing. If you buy a house purely to flip it, then sure.

Your comments are so important and correct. Not many people have noticed that this will be increasingly a fact of life in the US. I remember when it was Walmart that destroyed the business districts of small towns when they built on the edge of town. Shrinking population in the US, lack of workers is here today! That also means fewer people to buy stuff over time.

The population and economic retrenchment in the viability of life in small towns is one of the sources behind the passionate support for terrible people like Donald Trump. Their world is shrinking and they don't know what to do about it. It's not because of liberals or trans people somehow taking your stuff, and people trying to motivate you with cultural conflicts are not your friends. The economic model changed and we have fewer people around too. I'm not immune, as a software engineer my value to society will ebb and flow, who knows what Chat GPT will do to it.

And those $100k homes will go to zero. Rural Japan and Italy both face this today. The homes are dilapidated and free.

I generally agree though. Population decline is going to decimate areas at a scale and with a speed I don't think anyone is prepared for. If you get trapped in the decline you are screwed.

To add to that, people having kids later and having to move where career prospects are best means that fewer relatives are around to rely on, either because they’re too distant or have passed from old age.

I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, though. It’s better if couples have kids because they want to instead of doing it because it’s a matter of course by way of boredom or social pressures.

There’s probably enough people who do want them to keep up replacement rate if the factors I mentioned were addressed, since not only would it open some couples up to having kids, it would also make it more likely for those who’d otherwise only had one to have multiple.

There's already layers upon layers of empty home taxes in BC and vacancy remains near 0%. There's really no remarkable amount of empty homes anywhere. Every time someone has tried to search for it they've came up with very little.

The simple dull reality is that there's a huge shortage of homes because homes were under built for decades and decades due to 1) exclusionary zoning and 2) governments stopping funding any and all below market housing in the 1990s.

The shortage of suitable homes of course hurts families very badly.

Many large homes suitable for families are occupied by retirees that don't want to move and don't have anywhere good to move (because again, we've built little). Zoning prohibits subdivision and redevelopment of the vast majority of the surface areas of cities so creating more housing is difficult.

Families need 1300sqft+. We badly need to rezone the entirety of our cities broadly to allow massive sfh lots to be redeveloped to create multiple 1300sqft+ spaces suitable for families. Rowhouses, Townhouses, and Apartments.

Every human civilization that has ever existed requires the young being productive enough for themselves and about 2 other other dependents. This isn't some "muh capitalism" scapegoat.

Old people eventually can’t work and need people to take care of them. The more working people there are per non-working person, the easier this is. Birth rates dropping to half of replacement levels means there will decades, maybe even centuries, of unprecedented low worker:retiree ratios.

Unless I miss something, any reduction in population due to fewer births will change the age distribution, so reverting to 1 billion people without changing the age distribution means billions of people dying much earlier than they have been. I'm going to say that's ... not good.

Taking a long term view, half a century or a century out, at the rate the world is currently developing, it seems possible there will be no poor countries left to supply cheap labour. Most of the world will be wealthy, except for a few basketcases mired in warlordism and economic isolation, such as Congo, Burma, or North Korea today. Such regions will certainly have still have plenty of poor desperate people - but they will not have the education, etc., that the migrating masses driving the economies of the highly developed countries do today. They will be malnourished and illiterate and no one will want them as immigrants, just as they are unwanted as immigrants today. The rest of us seem to be on track to be part of one competitive globalized labour pool.

Because birth rates are dropping in every single country as people get educated and etc. 2nd generation immigrants are not having as many children either after the migrate so it is simply a stopgap until every country has a birthrate less than 2.1 (or whatever is needed to have stable population). That’s why I got curious what is this magical way of fixing the population decline.

Because the assumption that the places immigrants come from will continue to have high birth rates forever is unfounded.

> However, implementing some form of selective immigration with assimilation programs appears to be a potential solution

This would require not only legislative changes, but also a significant social shift. The broad Japanese society simply does not believe at present in “assimilation”, because it maintains such a strict in-group, out-group separation and the latter simply can never be Japanese in their view. For example, up to the end of the 20th century, Japanese would trust foreigners less the better those foreigners spoke Japanese, because a truly fluent and proficient foreigner would be viewed as confused about his/her ethnic identity or trespassing on something distinct Japanese. This has gradually changed somewhat with the influx of people from other Asian countries who work in kombinis etc., but it still shows the sort of social resistance that advocates for immigration reform are up against.

Why not a solution without immigration? Let's just stop pretending that we need to offshore human factories as well.