Japan's declining births on track to fall below 700k

> everyone moves to the largest cities

Anecdotal evidence in support of that:

I have lived for the past twenty-five years in Japan’s second-largest city, Yokohama, in an area convenient for shopping and mass transit. While the neighborhood immediately around my home hasn’t changed much during that time and is still a mix of single-family houses and two- and three-story apartment buildings, along the main streets and waterfront there has been steady construction of high-rise condominiums. The local public elementary school, which my two daughters attended and which my grandson will enter in 2026, is facing a critical shortage of classroom space as families with children move into the area [1]. Parts of Tokyo are facing a similar crisis [2].

I haven’t traveled much outside the major cities since before the pandemic, but the steady depopulation in many areas is said to be equally apparent.

[1] https://www.city.yokohama.lg.jp/kosodate-kyoiku/kyoiku/sesak...

[2] https://digital.asahi.com/articles/ASRDW7QGQRDNOXIE03K.html

Tokyo area population falls for first time (2022): https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14691787

> Ministry officials said deaths outnumbered births in the area by a wider margin than in previous years, fewer people entered the country from abroad amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and more people moved from the capital to other prefectures.

Its depicted in Wolf Children animated movie, where newly widowed mum sees a "we pay you to live in this village house" as best for her limited savings and she teams up with 5 fellow mums to commute her kids to school to a town with one.

Rural areas and smaller cities.

And it's not really a matter of low birthrate at these places. In fact, Tokyo has consistently had the lowest birthrate of all Japanese prefectures over the last few decades. The problem is that young people are migrating to large metropolitan areas in search for better opportunities.

It's also worth noting that despite the image, Japan's birth rate is HIGH for its region and among developed countries it is the almost the highest. Japan's fertility is higher than China's, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. The only arguably developed state in Asia which has a higher fertility rate is Brunei and I don't really know if it counts - it's very conservative and the economy is mostly based on oil and gas.

Japan's problem is that it has industrialized earlier than its Asian neighbors and the effects of low birth rates are already very evident (in the countryside). It also got the attention in western media as the poster child for low birth rate, but it shouldn't be — that honor should probably go to South Korea (fertility rate of 0.72 in 2023).

Not just young women, but older people too (~64%). Seems hard to believe they literally think it's hell, without serious societal breakdown. Are immigration and suicide sky high?

Interesting, and that's a shame. When I lived in Seoul as an American 10 years ago[1], I loved it. Everything there seemed nicer, more functional, and safer than in any city that I've ever experienced in America. It had an attractive mix of shiny new stuff and ancient stuff. There was natural beauty even just outside of the city, easily accessible by public transit. I'd like to see them open up to immigration because my wife and I would actually consider moving our family there permanently one day if it were an option.

[1] For just a year, and on the US government payroll, so obviously a very different experience from growing up there as a Korean.

Yeah, "surrounded by enemies" comes to mind for South Korea. I served there as an American in defense of the ROK, as generations of American troops have done since WWII, and I think it's ironic that in 100 years they might cease to exist not because of a North Korean and Chinese invasion but because their birth rate simply led to a collapse. (Although North Korea and China have their own demographic problems - I'm not sure if that defuses or heats up the situation.)

> unless you are an aspiring empire, or if you are surrounded by enemies, or if you have a huge debt.

Or if you depend on future generations to take care for older ones once they reach retirement age, which is all of them. (A savings account can't care for the elderly, so debt doesn't really have much to do with it; you can see the problem entirely while staying in real economic terms without looking at money.)

You can make up for some of that with immigration, but whether people will be very accepting of something like a >50% immigration rate over a single or two generations is also questionable.

Or you have pension obligations. Or are concerned about your dependency ratio.

IDK about east asia but the US population is still growing year over year, so I think it is more specific to eastern culture.

Just select cities. I had a decent bachelor pad from 2014 to 2020 that was 55,000 yen (~$550 at the time) with no rent adjustment over that time either, and I'm in an urban area of ~1 million people. Current place is ~82,000 but with the Yen getting body-slammed by the US dollar it's not that much more expensive.

The desirable cities with lots of jobs. OTOH, some rural towns are so desperate for people they'll give you a house for free (or nearly free).

https://www.rethinktokyo.com/free-houses-japan-countryside

For a while I've also had the gut feeling that the average age creeping up does something to the general mood of a culture. Young people are naturally more restless, ambitious, daring, and when the median person is very "settled" in their ways and closer to death than birth I think a certain vitality is lost.

putting the problem in terms of economics isn't incorrect, but I think it can be framed in a slightly more human and horrifying way:

As a fact of nature, young adults must do the hard labor necessary to keep the world operating. Historically, there have always been more of them than there were people physically incapable of doing that work: the old and very young.

If there are too many old people and not enough young people, who will take care of the old people?

It's also a political burden, in two senses:

1. directly: in a democracy where the majority of voters are 60+ years old and retired, politicians will end up seeing the old and retired as their base and pandering to them; and this will lead to them implementing policies that serve the old and retired, to the detriment of those of working age. (See: literally anything about Japan's work culture.)

2. indirectly: social mores evolve over time, but this mostly occurs within the more-flexible, still-identity-forming minds of people of young ages. You can think of "modern" social mores as viral memes that spread easily between the "young" nodes in a social network; but which won't spread to/through the "old" nodes of the network. A a "top-heavy" society, where the old greatly outnumber the young, doesn't have the mean virality coefficient necessary to allow "modern" social mores to spread and achieve fixation. This in turn means that younger generations will feel they are living in a society that is "stuck in the past", with "outdated" thinking, where they cannot affect meaningful social change, despite everyone in their own (usually generational-cohort) social circles agreeing with them.

Said differently, many government programs for citizen retirement benefits (eg Social Security) are structured as Ponzi Schemes that require population increases over time so later generations can pay for earlier generations.

If population is declining, it breaks how these programs are funding because there’ll be less n the younger generation to pay for the more people in the older generation.

> 83% of young korean women think of south korea as “hell”

The page shows 78% of young men with same opinion. But -- what other countries do they think would be better?

There is always this uncomfortable undercurrent of misogyny in all these fertility discussions along the lines of "how do we coerce women to have more children?" or "it's a woman's duty to breed." I'd like to hope we are more enlightened than that, but the sentiment is worryingly pervasive.

The doomsayers are probably right, we are in for hard economic times as birth rates decline. But maybe that is a good thing, and we can finally come up with a system that doesn't depend on exponential population growth.

No. Pollution, likely microplastics are preventing and interfering with reproductive behaviour.

Understand, we are complex beings. The desire to reproduce is not conscious. It is innate and compulsive. And if you interfere with that hormonally derived urge, this is the result.

It's not about money. That's on the conscious side. People had scads of kids during depressions and recessions, even when the pill was available, having kids was more important than not.

And if you looka around the world, the amount of children has nothing to do with the country, or culture. Women oppressed or not, it doesn't matter.

And what culture is more unique than Japan compared to the West? It's not culture, for the entire planet has a collapse in birthrates.

We're going extinct.

Humans aren't going extinct any time soon. The world population is projected to level off at 10 billion near 2100.

All of the other species on the planet might disagree.

It’s like asking why suicide is bad, you have a civilization without the will to propagate itself.

It's also backwards.

Structure society and economy in a way that makes it appealing to have children (both in that the hypothetical parents feel safe in doing so without endangering their own quality of life, and in that they can imagine the hypothetical children to be happy too), and people will have them.

Who tf cares about "the nation". There's only one thing that matters: me.

Market Imposed Labor Quota is so high that people aren't allowed to raise their own children. Amazing.

also, working hours remain unofficially very long with things like after-work activities, so it has the double whammy of making it nearly impossible for women to balance career with housework and also making it hard for men to contribute to housework at all.

Not Japanese either, but I have lived and worked in Japan long enough.

> From what I understand, the cost of living is very high

The cost of living in Japan is not as high as it used to be and lower than many other countries. There is relatively high inflation now, but that's due to a weak Yen and relatively low interest rates. If anything, Japan's cost of living has hit rock bottom in absolute terms.

>Women are typically expected to stop working after marriage or childbirth

That's also quite outdated. This is called "kotobuki taisha" (can be roughly translated as "Congratulatory quitting") and it used to be the norm, but nowadays most of the women return to work, usually after taking a maternity leave and childcare leave, which are guaranteed by law[1].

There is still an issue of old (or old-fashioned) bosses and colleagues who either push women to quit after childbirth or passive-aggressively hint them that they should be taking better care of their children by being full-time moms. That behavior is called "matahara" (maternity harassment) and its frowned upon, but unfortunately still quite common[2].

> men have to bring in a fair amount of money in order to support a family

The cost of raising a child is high and probably a factor in choosing to have fewer children, but I don't think Japan is different from most other developed countries here. Public education is quite comprehensive in Japan, and private spending on education is lower than OECD average[3].

> Given the price of larger dwellings in larger cities

Large dwellings in Tokyo and other central metropolitan areas are expensive, but you have to keep in mind modern Japanese houses are quite small by international standards, even in rural areas where land is cheap. Old Japanese houses were larger, but this is just the standard for new Japanese houses. The norm is probably somewhere around 70-120 square of meters of floor space (i.e. all floors combined). I've yet to see any Japanese person complain about the size of Japanese houses, this doesn't seem to be a concern for anyone (except for us foreigners, who got used to a different standard of living).

If you're fine with a not-too-large house, you could get a house in the suburban area around Tokyo with a 2 hour commute, with mortgage for a while. But land prices rose quite a bit recently (not sure if this is true for all areas), and with the recent interest rate hikes, Japanese mortgages are not quite the nearly-free money they used to be.

In short, I think most of the factors above are outdated. High cost of living for single-income families and workplace hostility towards double-income families were probably strong factor in the previous decades, but not now.

I don't know if there is any accepted conclusion on the most relevant factors that affect Japan, but for me the following factors ring true:

1. Lack of daycare facilities (hoikuen): Japan has two types of pre-primary education: preschools (youchien) and daycare centers (hoikuen). Youchien end too early for working parents, and they traditionally structured around the assumption of having a full-time housewife. The mother is expected to do a lot of busywork like making bento (lunchboxes), sewing uniforms, attending various events, handling regular feedback the teacher, etc.

Hoikuen is a better fit for working moms, but there seems to be a shortage, and there are long waiting lists for daycare centers in some areas. The situation seemed to have improved significantly over the last couple of years, but this was a big issue in previous year. If you can't find a daycare center, it's kinda hard for a mom to return to employment after childbirth.

2. Nomikai Culture: Japanese companies tend to constantly have Noimaki (drinking parties) after work. Depending on the company and role, these can range from once a month to 3-4 times a week, and from optional fun to implicitly mandatory. In many companies, they could be optional in theory, but schmoozing during these parties is important for promotion and relationship with your customer. This culture took a strong hit during COVID-19, and seems to have never fully recovered since. So this is another factor that may be improving, but still affected birthrates over the last 10 years.

3. Matahara: As I've mentioned above, women who choose both career and child-rearing might still suffer some harassment at work. Women who don't need to rely solely on their husband's income. Naturally, stay-at-home-dads are barely a thing in Japan.

4. Limited unskilled labor immigration: Most western countries have accepted a large number of unskilled immigrants who by definition tend to be less educated. Women education is widely accepted to be the number one factor in determining birth rate, so having high unskilled labor immigration artificially pumps up your country's birth rate as long as that immigration trend continues (the original immigrants would typically get closer the country's birthrate within a generation or two).

Until recently, Japan severely restricted immigration of unskilled employees, but that has been changing too over the last few years. There are still many limitations that keep education levels higher than "completely unskilled", such as requiring Japanese language proficiency and professional exams and training, and visa recipients cannot bring their family to Japan until 5 years later (and even then with some restrictions). So I don't expect seeing big shifts in that direction for the next 10 years.

[1] https://archive.is/yPcOF#selection-1581.143-1581.149 https://mataharanet.org/en/what-is-matahara/

[2] https://mataharanet.org/en/what-is-matahara/

[3] https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/private-spending-on-...

France, and not even by much

None, by definition, right? Because the ones where policy works don't have declining birth rates.

Just wait a few centuries and evolution will have fixed this.

I don't think that's the problem. It's the same issue insurance faces when setting prices. The government knows how to price insurance and hire actuaries.

So distribution of consumption from bottom 50% is closer to 33%.

https://www.bls.gov/cex/pce-ce-distributions.htm