Have young people in Japan stopped having sex?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It's probably too much to ask - but I think there should be something in between a scientific journal and common journalism. In technology we have some pretty insightful articles coming up in blogs now and then, articles where sources are cited and you can go deeper on any subject if you like. Why can't traditional journalists not use the web the way it is meant to?
"Japan already has one of the world's lowest birth rates. Its population of 126 million, which has been shrinking for the past decade, is projected to plunge a further one-third by 2060."
"The number of single people has reached a record high. A survey in 2011 found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of romantic relationship, a rise of almost 10% from five years earlier. Another study found that a third of people under 30 had never dated at all."
"A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 "were not interested in or despised sexual contact". More than a quarter of men felt the same way."
"Official alarmism doesn't help. Fewer babies were born here in 2012 than any year on record. (This was also the year, as the number of elderly people shoots up, that adult incontinence pants outsold baby nappies in Japan for the first time.)"
[1] Although I'm not yet sure whether more babies is actually what Japan needs right now - looking at their population density, going easy on the baby making might be ok for a while, if there is a plan in place on how to turn it around once the population has fallen to more sustainable levels (and also how to pay for everyone's pensions in the meantime).
One of the big problems of course is the fact that while outsiders can see dynamics of and sometimes critique cultures, such critiques are necessarily incomplete (well all critiques are necessarily incomplete but outsider ones are especially likely to be).
But on your final question, I think one of the big issues is that the corporate media insists on pushing everything into narratives the corporations can understand. For example, in the US I tend to associate with people from a wide variety of backgrounds politically (and talk politics, as taboo as that is) and one thing I have noticed is that while the media tends to see social conservatives as the "sex police" the social conservative movement is the largest movement in the US which questions the desirability of Capitalism on an economic level (and the critiques are really interesting), but that doesn't work for corporations, so....
So here you have a corporate media organization engaging in difficult cross-cultural criticism. While it is an interesting article, it says as much about Western corporations as it does about Japan.
2) So the problem is that corporate media is politically streamlined? Yes, I absolutely think so. In Switzerland we have an interesting weekly magazine called 'Weltwoche', which allows rather extreme opinion pieces of all political sides to appear unedited. I enjoyed that a lot, until the selection of articles began to appear biased to the right. I think the idea is still great - give me unfiltered opinions and analysis, instead just filter by the 'intellectual depth' if you will. It'd be black coffee in magazine form.
Hilaire Belloc in 1918 wrote a wonderful critique of corporate newspapers where he pointed out that their real customers are advertisers, and that in many cases, the cross-ownership of media by other corporations, as well as cross-board memberships meant that the corporate press would necessarily adopt positions friendly to the largest corporations. His book "The Free Press" (although very right wing) is worth reading. It totally anticipates Chomsky's critiques as well.
> I enjoyed that a lot, until the selection of articles began to appear biased to the right. I think the idea is still great - give me unfiltered opinions and analysis, instead just filter by the 'intellectual depth' if you will. It'd be black coffee in magazine form.
It is a good reason to have a robust blogosphere and read blogs you might otherwise disagree with as well as those who you agree with.
I agree - I haven't really found good resources on general topic blogs however. Collections such as TrueReddit or DepthHub often start out well, but as time goes on, quality goes down. It seems like there is some kind of sedimentation force going on when people can up-/downvote.
Huh. Reference? Perhaps it's because I just don't know enough conservative folks, but I've never heard of a mainstream socially conservative anti-capitalist dialogue.
If what you say is true, either I have a pretty huge hole in my political knowledge (that or we're just using 'socially conservative' or 'capitalist' to mean different things.) Especially if it's the former, I'd like to close that hole.
Care to point them out?
A lot of it boils down to the critiques of market capitalism by Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Chesterton and how these have largely continued within the conservative Catholic movement, as well as parts of the Orthodox and conservative Protestant communities as well.
I am a Heathen and I worship Odin, Thorr, and Freyr. Chesterton can be a bit arrogant when it comes to religion sometimes, but the reasons for his arrogance are often interesting to ponder even when one does not share the same religion.
"According to distributists, property ownership is a fundamental right and the means of production should be spread as widely as possible rather than being centralized under the control of the state (state socialism) or of accomplished individuals (laissez-faire capitalism). Distributism therefore advocates a society marked by widespread property ownership and, according to co-operative economist Race Mathews, maintains that such a system is key to bringing about a just social order.
Distributism has often been described in opposition to both socialism and capitalism, which distributists see as equally flawed and exploitative."
- In standard English, "Japanese", "Chinese", etc. are now used only as adjectives and not nouns (although the noun usage used to be acceptable). So you can't correctly say "a Japanese came in" any more than you can say "a Swedish came in." http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/29887-grammar...
- "The Japanese" remains valid as a way to refer to the people of that nation collectively.
- "-(i)an" endings are both nouns and adjectives, so Canadians, Germans, and Ankh-Morporkians are all fine.
- "-man/woman" endings are no longer applied except where they've become idiomatic, so we have Welshman and Frenchman, but not Chineseman or Japaneseman. ("Chinaman" is, of course, derogatory.)
- For an exhaustive rundown of the topic, see "Demonym" on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonym
- In more academic or historical writing, you might still find "-ese" in use as a noun ending, but it sounds faintly racist and outdated: "More than a hundred Chinese up to that date had been interrogated by police." http://books.google.com.sg/books?id=Yqemz6q_nQYC&lpg=PA74&ot... (The same might apply to "-ish" words, but I'm not certain.)
-
(To throw_away) Like you, I've done my fair share of correcting Chinese speakers about this usage, too. But I've seen regular use of "a Chinese" in various older English writing, so the usage is at least historically justified, and probably slipped into older instructional texts. It doesn't surprise me that some of the textbooks used in China may not have kept up with changes in usage over the last few decades - in the first place, English teaching there was almost zilch in the past and remains very spotty today.
vvvvvv
Most people would think that's an odd or deragotory way of saying that.
I'm married to a Scott works though.
Not sure there is a general purpose word you can use to say "I'm married to someone from Britian".
(https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...)
* "Jim is British" - "British" is the demonym
* "Jim is a Brit" - "Brit" is the ____
I'm not sure what the correct google search term would be to find out this.
An/a American/Mexican/Thai/German sounds ok.
A Japanese/Chinese/Dutch sounds wrong.
First, just because they are "traditional journalists".
Second, because they got lots of eyeballs with this article.
1.no actual data supported. This is more like: I used 5 people to prove Japanese stop having sex.
2.no study of source.
just imagination, I doubt if this is FBI undercover job tried to ruin theguardian's name.
What westerners might call 'casual sex' -- sex without the framework of a relationships that implies various other promieses/committments -- is normal, and also not likely to be spoken about frankly, especially to a reporter, and much less a British one.
Sometimes I'll witness a young woman asked about it at a social gathering (as people have a few drinks and speak more freely). "I don't have anybody... I can't remember the last time I slept with somebody," she might say. What she means is that she doesn't have a steady boyfriend, and thus it is certainly none of your business who she's fucking.
Or I will see a guy asked about it. "Well, romance is too complicated with all I've got going on... I've learned to live without it," he might say, with just the right amount of sheepishness. What he means is that he is seeking only sex that doesn't come with implied commitments and hassle.
These two people might very well end up leaving together.
There's no evidence of any trend that young people in Japan have stopped having sex. That is what I was trying to point out: not being in an old-fashioned relationship, and not actually bearing children, does not any longer have any kind of direct relationship to how much sex you are having.
There may well be ongoing generational changes to reproductive and marriage/relationship behavior in Japan, as there is elsewhere (c.f. everywhere on Earth), but this article doesn't go there.
I look toward the prospects of women in Japan for an indication as to what's wrong. These are people who have grown up with dreams that society seems unwilling to support. For how many women in Japan is 'Maybe it's time to have a kid in the next few years' tantamount to "I must give up any dreams of having a career"?
And why not just more one night stands? Because they are short on commitment (feel alone and, thus, scared in the morning), caring, ..., children.
And just for passion, a good version requires the couple to have had a lot of time together and to care about each other -- e.g., for a man, the best result of passion is that, net, she smiles the rest of the evening, the next morning, and well into the next day, and that takes some mutual caring, practice, and effort.
Why so value the smiles? Because they promise 1000 more good evenings of passion instead of maybe 0, lots of good back rubs, a nice breakfast, lots of 'contact comfort' for, say, another 24 hours, etc.
This doesn't fit the article:
> A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 "were not interested in or despised sexual contact". More than a quarter of men felt the same way.
So A: the person asking the questions isn't a reporter, B: they aren't British, and C: they have every reason to figure out a way to get people to answer the questions honestly, i.e., not "cultural misunderstanding" where someone at a party lies about how much sex they have.
What your argument really boils down to is: "no measurement, real or otherwise, could ever possibly indicate that Japanese people are having less sex": i.e. your post is unfalsifiable, and your claim thusly ludicrous.
>There may well be ongoing generational changes to reproductive and marriage/relationship behavior in Japan [...] but this article doesn't go there.
Did you read it?
>Japan's Institute of Population and Social Security reports an astonishing 90% of young women believe that staying single is "preferable to what they imagine marriage to be like".
So we can correctly interpret your post: what precisely is "going there", if not this?
The article is also based on the opinions of two people who have been claiming to study Japanese sexual behavior: the therapist Ai Aoyama and the sociologist Nicholas Eberstadt. Certainly the opinion of two "experts" is not a conclusive analysis of a situation, but this is a pretty ordinary way of sourcing information for a news article. It isn't particularly "stupid" for this. Which is why statements like this:
>There's no evidence of any trend that young people in Japan have stopped having sex.
make you look dishonest in light of this:
http://www.ipss.go.jp/site-ad/index_english/nfs14/Nfs14_Sing...
http://www.durex.com/en-jp/sexualwellbeingsurvey/documents/g...
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20110906ad.html
You can dispute the strength of the evidence, but it isn't "no evidence".
I know plenty of western young people who have no interest in marriage, procreation or families. Maybe they're more interested in their work. Maybe they're more interested in rock-climbing. Maybe they're more interested in Pokemon.
More power to them, I say.
One of the most basic needs when planning for a future is the prospect that the future will be better than the past. It's now very difficult to arrange that independently of constant advancement at work and constant advancement at work requires tremendous amounts of effort.
People are getting squeezed from both sides. I feel this myself, and I'm doing quite well statistically; white, male, educated, highly skilled and gainfully employed.
It has lots to do with it.
Brazil for example has PLENTY of space and cheap places to live (unless you want to live in São Paulo... like where I am now, the prices here ARE fucked up)
Yet marriages are going down to the point of scare the government too.
The reason for it is simple (there has been lots of research, not only here, but on other countries with declining births to dangerous levels): women prefer their careers to motherhood...
Even the UN gender economic report, state that it thinks is a good thing women have less kids because they can get richer (yes, that is written in the report, specifically, the report consider that countries where women have less than 3 kids, are countries that are awesome because they are reaching gender equality, since women with less kids can work more)
For men, it is the invention of no-fault divorce, that keeps marriage pointless (the point of marriage historically, in cultures where divorce was forbidden by law or by custom or by religion, was to force women stay in the marriage, and indeed in countries with no-fault divorce, no matter where, they keep finding that 70% of the divorces with no reason where started by women)
Let me be clear: I'm not suggesting that women have any societal obligations.
But given that we're all here today we can infer historically that women (as a whole) have liked having children at least some amount. Did they never ACTUALLY like it but that was their only choice? Or do they (again as a whole) enjoy motherhood but socioeconomic life is now so treacherous that motherhood is a luxury few can afford? Perhaps something else entirely from the false dichotomy I've suggested?
EDIT: I've accepted your premise at face value, but I'm not sure I should. I don't know how to properly caveat this comment.
It promotes the emancipation of women. When men care about children as much, there is no problem in having kids and a career for women (and men).
Once women have the freedom to choose not to get married, have kids, etc it seems likely that some choose not to and thus the rise of feminism is roughly correlated with a decline in birthrates.
I've tidied this up in a nice little causal package but it's quite likely not so clear cut. But it certainly does seem that way at a glance. Which is why the notion gets such good traction amongst some.
The UN report on gender equality in economy, writes explictly that countries where women have fertility of less than 3 is good, because research shows that women with high education has few kids, and thus it concludes that a country with not much kids mean that country has educated women, that from the point of the view of the report is a good thing.
If your "70% of no-fault divorces were started by women" statistic holds true, it could be because the greater economic power wielded by men made them pretty shitty husbands, and so when the opportunity arose, their wives divorced them.
Not only about their sex lives, but just about all manner of private things. This is a culture where when you buy a book at a bookstore, they wrap it in a cover for you so that people around you won't know what you are reading.
Many drug stores have extra-opaque dark bags that you can request when you buy stuff you would rather keep private -- don't want the person next to you on the train knowing you have tampons or -- heaven forbid -- hemmhoroid creme. (Of course a small subset of those train riders won't feel any special compunction to hide their 800-page comic book featuring anthropomorphized household appliances coming live at night and raping strangely compliant schoolgirls, but those people are the exception that proves my rule.)
I think the Japanese would be about the least open about the intimate details of their sex lives than basically any modern advanced democratic population.
(The shyness comes from that in a large fraction of quarrels someone(s) will be carried away, in pieces. You don't cause offense without very good reason. Not sober, anyway.)
Also, while the title is certainly link-baity, I think the point of the article is more about the lack of desire to cultivate meaningful intimate relationships that turn into families.
japanese are particularly good at keeping different segments of their identity separate.
1. Increasing number of Japanese have just casual sex.
2. Increasing number of Japanese don't have sex (with other human) at all.
There is statistical data from several surveys backing this up.
But, of course, the article really might be just pure fantasy with invented statistics.
(I have no idea. Since it is easily testable, any fact checkers at the magazine would find out quickly. But maybe only NYTimes have them, these days.)
Edit: Grammar fix. ferongr, I wrote condom and VD sales like that, since they obviously play off each others -- we do talk about short term affairs... (Ok, gaius did note the third case -- pregnancies/abortions :-) Also supports my points, the amount of sex is easy to measure.)
The OP post here discrediting the situation in Japan claiming cultural differences is not understanding that shit DID went downhill.
(by the way, even before the earthquake, there was already numerous article and blog posts written by western reporters but also japanese women complaining that young japanese women cannot convince grasseaters to fuck them... there was even some people that went to reveal their personal anecdotes of forcing men to sleep naked with them, and the guy just... slept, and no matter how much the women caressed him, he just would not have sex)
Or it could mean that Japanese people have more unprotected sex and that they value personal hygiene and health more, resulting in lower condom sales and V.D. rates per capita.
Also note the additional obvious problems: Other birth control sales, just like condoms, are easy to find statistically -- and environmental factors ought to be obvious among people trying to get kids.
It doesn't claim that. It says that 25% of young men and 45% of young women are repulsed by sexual contact. That means that 75% of men and 55% of women are still open to it (and, presumably, having it).
I'd bet that if you looked at an American college campus, you'd find similar behavioral statistics, due to the declining ability of young Americans to form intimate relationships (which may not be their fault). Casual sex doesn't fit most people. Many people (including most men) can't get it and many (including most women) don't want it. Only about 50-60% participate in the casual market even once, and half of those end up wishing they hadn't.
Still, a 35% sexlessness rate among people in their 20s means that something is wrong. It doesn't mean that people have stopped having sex (65% are) but it's still a sign of something unhealthy. I don't take those numbers (which are probably not very different from those in the West) to indicate voluntary disinterest, but artifacts of undue stress.
When the cause of the sexlessness (which is not just a Japanese problem) is unnecessary corporate stress, it's worth looking for solutions.
Casual sex doesn't fit most people. Many people (including
most men) can't get it and many (including most women) don't
want it. Only about 50-60% participate in the casual market
even once, and half of those end up wishing they hadn't.
"Tomita says a woman's chances of promotion in Japan stop dead as soon as she marries. "The bosses assume you will get pregnant." Once a woman does have a child, she adds, the long, inflexible hours become unmanageable. "You have to resign. You end up being a housewife with no independent income. It's not an option for women like me."
Great, so if a woman marries she loses independence and her own income, and then people don't know why women don't want to marry?
Same thing here:
"Romantic commitment seems to represent burden and drudgery, from the exorbitant costs of buying property in Japan to the uncertain expectations of a spouse and in-laws"
A potential downside of making women equal to men is that they become more similar. They don't need each other. They don't complement each other anymore. Opposites attract, but if women are expected to succeed in the same way as men, then the prior balance is lost.
This messy compromise seems impossible for women in Japan.
More conservative societies see a steeper decline in birthrate as women participation in the workforce increases.
That's why France has one of the highest birthrate in Europe for instance.
Disclaimer: I grew up in Germany/Austria and find the topic of Europeqn demographics quite intriguing
As far as France and immigrants go, I'm not sure relevant studies are available (since France has very specific policies about not mentionning race/origin in its official data). But My intuition is that the role of the immigrant population is overrated. Mostly because the keyword here is "recent" and while France has a rather large population of second or third generation immigrants, the recent immigrant population is probably not much higher than anywhere in Europe.
Stop giving these freebies and fertility rates will drop in no time.
The question is , should we encourage it? in the long run ,it doesnt make sense. We often hear on the radio here how Germans dont make babies anymore and it will doom Germany. I dont think so, one country doesnt need perpetual population growth in order to survive, i believe Germans are smarter on these issues.
Can a country with perpetually declining and aging population survive? In what form?
France has very active policies in place to promote large families, which is why if you run into a French couple with children they'll often have three or more instead of just one or two.
I wonder sometimes if maybe we've swung too far in the direction of gender equality, where now we shame people into believing their self worth can only be found through their professional success, rather than letting them live a life they more care to live. How many times have I seen an article grace the HN homepage defending the idea of being a stay-at-home-whatever?
Its not just salaryman and stay at home wife turning into salaryman and salarywoman, its unemployed dude and salarywoman at the same time.
Well they are living on an island. You can't grow your population forever in a finite space without increased competition.
This is true in most places. The supposedly horribly expensive countries (U.K., Japan, Switzerland; to a lesser degree, the U.S.) are quite affordable outside of the major cities. And there are plenty of high-quality cities that aren't expensive-- analogues of Austin and Portland.
I've come to the conclusion that locating in a large city, for a business, and requiring people work in-office, is an unfunded mandate that borders on the inappropriate. It's worth having a corporate office there, of course; but expecting people to live in a high-COL area if they want to have a career at your company is not only classist, but probably a tactical mistake as well. Remote work poses a lot of difficulties, but it's the only thing that will save us from this catastrophic, worldwide real estate problem. (We should also work on high-speed, affordable trains... but one step at a time.)
Winner-take-all economics is somewhat inevitable, and the best that a government can do is to place a floor under it (i.e. it can't, and shouldn't, prevent the winners from shooting ahead; but it should prevent poverty for the less fortunate) but when WTA applies to places, you get wide swathes of joblessness and a few cities with robust economies but housing prices so severe as to constitute a return of debt bondage. Instead of indentured servants paying for their boat ride, now they pay a 500% housing premium for the ability to live there (i.e. access to the local job market). It's the return of hereditary oligarchy, with real estate being passed from one generation to the next and almost unaffordable on the legitimate market (due to regulatory corruption coming from entrenched, malignant interests-- owners trying to keep their property prices artificially high.)
No one asks, "Why did people drink so much in Communist Russia?" because it's taken as self-evident that Soviet-style communism was a gloomy, depressing system so "of course" people hit the vodka. Yet it surprises the hell out of people that urbanites under a runaway market system have stopped having children (and, in some sad cases, relationships and sex).
Japan is concentrated on the urban areas, apart from that it's very scarcely populated.
And Japan is bigger (area) than Germany.
If living and being in Japan has taught me anything, it's that generalising from anecdote is not a good idea.
Case in point, if you visit an outlet mall a few miles outside of central Sendai on a weekend, you'd have a lot of trouble convincing anyone that Japanese people aren't making enough babies. It was very, very difficult to spot single people, or even couples without babies crawling all over them on our one day out there.
In a population of nearly 130 million, if there's any generalisation you want to make about Japanese people, you'll find enough anecdotes to put together into a convincing article.
On the usage of mendokusai, I think the author of the article may have misunderstood in the situation he's describing. I believe that in this situation mendokusai meant "It's tiresome to be constantly propositioned by male colleagues at work" rather than "I would have sex with everyone, but I can't be bothered". IME you use mendokusai whenever you're tired of something, along with describing a task that is tiresome.
Also the word 面倒 translates to trouble, difficulty; care; attention;, so that with +くさい would make it troublesome.
I've not heard it being used for messy, unless perhaps you mean messy as in a messy situation (rather than say, a messy room).
[1]: http://jisho.org/words?jap=%E9%9D%A2%E5%80%92%E3%81%8F%E3%81...
Resource depletion is among the highest risks to civilization. Seems straightforward that severe population decline should be desired, and voluntary refraining from reproduction should be welcome.
(Please don't just extrapolate the trend till extinction. See http://xkcd.com/605/. )
But this will be a trend that autocorrects itself after some time, as less elder people will be there in the future. Also, the younger people if both working will create more prosperity than being married with one working and the other one staying at home.
In the short term this sounds bad, but long term doesn't seem that worrisome.
The problem is that people in general are living longer but the retirement age is staying roughly the same. So as time goes on you have a higher percentage of the people who aren't working but yet consuming public resources.
In the short term it is bad. In the long term it is devastating. Which is why every developed country is aggressively increasing the immigration rate to compensate. Well except for Japan.
It's obvious that this is an unsustainable solution.
Some people were alarmist about the ageing population in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Their doomsday predictions turned out to be wrong because of technological advances that meant fewer working people could provide the real goods and services for more non-working people.
And what cannot be buffered by technology simply leads to lower unemployment, which is a good thing as well.
My mom's been "retired" for almost a decade now. She's had 2 part-time jobs and usually a volunteer gig too for nearly the entire time.
And what happens when you have young people living with their parents ? Far less opportunities for sex.
Young people in Japan live with their parents due to lack of jobs. The Japanese employment market has recently had a massive shift towards part time labour instead of full time labor, leaving young people with jobs that can't support them.
Also, Japan has had a solution for the "opportunities for sex" issue for decades - the massive amount of hourly Love Hotels that are scattered all around the country (and people aren't shy to use - I've had to queue for one).
At my girlfriend's former job, a normal day went like this: the employees were expected to work from 9 in the morning to 8 in the evening (time on contract: 9-6) then attend staff meetings in another city, with one 30min break for the entire day (meant to be an hour, but who's counting?)
Remember that this is for a full-time employee - the main reason companies only want part-time staff now is so they can avoid paying their 50% of your health insurance and for vacations.
Working way too long isn't a new thing in Japan. The company not keeping up their end of the bargain (good benefits, job for life) is. If the govt grew some balls and actually enforced existing labor laws instead of letting companies abuse their employees, maybe people would have time and energy to have more kids earlier.
The fact that you can now not rely on your company supporting your family for life is just the final nail in the coffin.
My gf is actually looking at marriage as an honorable out with her company - if she just quit flat out, she'd be "abandoning" the company and placing a higher burden on her coworkers (company isn't doing too well...), and if she wanted to get a new job, it would be a huge black mark on her resume. Getting married? Well then OBVIOUSLY she needs to quit, it's not her fault.
1) Housing vacancy - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-17/vacant-japan-homes-...
2) We have something here called "Love Hotels" - you rent them by the hour or half-day, and they are EVERYWHERE
Oh, wait, you were speaking from the perspective of the corporations and rich investors who have to pay wages.
Funny how you adopted that perspective when you are a worker yourself.....
In the worst case, it could bring the bloody end of civilization as we know it.
I agree that society and technology could evolve us through a much more desirable path. But the more time we can buy for that to happen, the better.
I would inflect this differently. An open and free society is much more likely to figure out a desirable path for the future than one steered by central authority.
(In fact, it is the accumulation of thousands or millions of small improvements that will, in retrospect, be seen as a desirable path.)
Desiring "extra" conservation of the resources that today seem most limited, might not necessarily be incompatible with an open and unplanned society. But it usually is.
I'm talking about letting people choose not to reproduce (textbook freedom), instead of having a government policy to influence them to revert their choices for the perceived greater good (central planning).
The underlying problem is that sustainable products almost always have a price premium attached to them. And because the benefits of sustainability are indirect it's hard to convince people to pay more.
That evolution can be triggered by higher prices for ressources. And as they get rarer prices do go up.
On the other hand, small countries with few people are usually able to accomplish little. Places with few inhabitants are considered rural and have a lower standard of living than places with high extremely high population density, like cities.
I agree with your point that, from a nationalist perspective, population size is basically nation size.
Which recent wars are not about resources, do you think?
You see the US as invading Iraq to control it's oil. I see the US invading Iraq out of frustration and the wish to "send a message" a-la mafiosos.
Most wars are fought over honor and respect.
Which we could have simply purchased at a tiny fraction of the cost of going to war for it.
I'm still waiting for all of that free oil we "won" to start making its way over here. It's almost as if the war wasn't fought for oil, but for oil companies. Gee.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/dissecting-obamas-speech-at-the...
The system only works when there's growth... a huge decline in population (hence births, hence sexual activity ...) is the biggest fear of all governments, as it deflates the foundations current countries/systems/power balances/... are built on. It's also the reason why worldwide "family values" and "the traditional family (unit) as cornerstone of the society" are main political points, independent of culture, religion, ...
That sounds like a bug.
Ideally, the birthrate would be close to the replacement rate. Much lower and you run into very significant problems. If you want to draw down the population, a birth rate of say, 90-95% of the replacement rate would not be so bad.
Fun fact: an evolutionary explanation for "witch hunts" is that when the tribe is low on food, they're an excuse to get rid of less useful / influential elderly people. Which is why they happen more in resource constrained developing countries than rich developed ones.
But it goes to show that if young people feel that the elderly are more burdensome than useful, they may find a way to get rid of them.
So yes, it's pretty bad for some people to limit births. You are essentially diminishing your influence and putting yourself at risk of being swallowed up by other cultures.
I know you like links, but I am busy now and cannot re-find them...
But basically, any country that is prosperous enough to women work in equal terms to men in a safe environment (ie: police exists and army is strong), ends having women rights movements, a acceptance of homosexuals, and a sharp rise in individualism.
Then a mix of this happen (usually all of it, and it DID happened in Rome):
no-fault divorce (prompting huge amount of women-initiated divorces, and then men stopping marriages) babysitters and daycare (because women are not home to take care of children) great numbers of women that prefer their careers over marriage great numbers of men men that prefer goofing around instead of having responsability over a household.
All this usually results in decline of births, and debt problems as countries start to debase their currency in a attempt to keep the same standard of living for the old while there is not enough young people (this is much worse in countries with military all over the globe, like Rome)
Then you start having governments defaulting on obligations to pay police and army, undoing the conditions that allowed the equality, then your country either drift back to a previous condition, or if it was big enough and streched far enough, it collapses (like Rome did, as your defaulted police and army, immigrants covering for lack of native young people, and lack of native young people to defend their native land, makes your country a sitting duck for anyone that want to bring it down)
I think that being the first rich, advanced large country that isn't western is the reason. On paper, they have a similar relationship with money, technology, their religion and traditional culture. I can't explain the strangeness away with those differences.
When I read something like this about some trend or supposed cultural pathology cropping up, I have nothing to connect it to. I don't intuitively get where its coming from or why. Not even a hint. I don't know whether to dismiss it as conservatives concerned with something harmless, some fringe phenomenon or whatever.
Japan is just an extreme case because their current set of values doesn't deviate as much from more traditional values, which escalates the problem.
Germany is actually somewhat similiar to Japan when it comes to these issues and while the results are by far not as extreme the reasons are very similar: lack of government support for modern types of families and traditional values that still have a strong impact on how children are supposed to be raised.
In a previous generation ALL would be married, ALL would have at least one child.
With the amazing variety and quantity of high-quality porn nowadays, it never ceases to amaze me the great efforts people are willing to undergo for the possibility of sex.
When I ask, most people admit they don't really like that place or feel like doing that, they do it only to increase their prospects of having casual sex. C'mon, it's the 21st century!
She has two legs. He has two legs. If she breaks a leg, then she is down to one leg to help her broken leg get well. But joined with him with good vows, commitment, etc. they have four legs with three good legs to help her broken leg get well. Can rattle off 10,000 such cases faster than can say them.
People don't want to be alone. Being alone is scary. Nearly all baby mammals know this. Being joined to someone is much more secure.
Anyway, how is sex risky and overcomplicated (unless sharp objects, diseases and coordinated acrobatics are involved)? Sex should be simple fun. Maybe you refer to dating or the search for a partner.
If today's gay hookup apps are any indicator, straight hookups will become instant gratification at the tap of a button, soon. We 're not there yet because of cultural hangups.
I think what the article was, however, was an advertisement for the former dominatrix. Apparently you can pay her to talk to you about women, pay her more to get naked while she talks about women, and maybe if you play your cards right...
You have bold claims regarding my understanding and intent to offend. Elaborate.
I can't speak to signage, as I generally steer clear of areas that seem shady, and I wouldn't put a lot of trust into such things anyway.
Regarding the source of much of the information in this article, I have little to offer. If you were to weigh the hypothesis that the source was advertising services against the hypothesis that this came up in conversation with the article author and she found this worth noting, which do you think is more likely, given that this is interesting information that is unlikely to be left out of a sex-charged article?
In this case, being charitable about the parties involved in this article is probably correct.
So, I've looked into the government research about it, at least for income part as it is being tangible. [1]
As for income, there have been some research that lifetime unmarried rate would collaborate with income. (Mostly for male) [2]
Their research further says that "In 2010, for male percentage of marriage for permanent employee is 27.7% while same for temp workers are 6.7%, resulting in about 20% of difference, while for female it is 28.2% for permanent workers, and 25.8% for temp workers, shows the much less difference. Therefore the increased rate of male temp workers is contributing to unmarriage rate or marriage at an older age. [3]
[1] http://www.mlit.go.jp/hakusyo/mlit/h24/hakusho/h25/index.htm....
[2] http://www.mlit.go.jp/hakusyo/mlit/h24/hakusho/h25/image/n10...
[3] http://www.mlit.go.jp/hakusyo/mlit/h24/hakusho/h25/html/n122...
Women have been liberated from a lot of their gender roles, but seem fine with keeping men in theirs.
http://inventorspot.com/articles/six_startling_scenes_overcr...
The global population is 7.1 billion and rising fast. We should all cheer when we hear these statistics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization#Environmental_eff...
Sums up my feelings pretty much exactly. I lack much, if any parental instincts. I also lack any family or peer pressure to marry and make babies. Without the push to produce offspring relationships have more downsides than up. Children 10 times as so.
I enjoy relationships (well most of them). But, there is so much to do and experience in the world. I'll never get to all before I die. There's no reason to spend my time in sub-optimal pursuits.
So there should be not just 'friction' but 'love' (with the help that Mother Nature provides) with commitment, caring, affection, intimacy, passion, joining of lives, vows, romance, trust (he doesn't return from a business trip and discover that she's drained the checkbook and savings account, took the best of the household belongings and the dog, and is gone), respect, responsiveness (they respond to each other), supportive families (e.g., he gets a job in her father's business), collection of activities, memories, and traditions like, don't want to lose, can't get anywhere else, and that cause 'lock in', homes ("where the heart is, where you are loved even when you are wrong"), and children ("the most rewarding thing we did").
Joining? For a few hundred years in Western Civilization, standard marriage vows started off with "We gather together to join this man and this women with the bonds of holy matrimony.", and there is wisdom there.
Or, for a more direct explanation, she has two legs. He has two legs. If she breaks a leg, then she is down to one leg to help her broken leg get well. But joined with him with good vows, commitment, etc. they have four legs with three good legs to help her broken leg get well. The three legs are three times better than just the one. Can rattle off 10,000 such cases faster than can say them.
People don't want to be alone. Being alone is scary. Nearly all baby mammals know this. Being joined to someone is much more secure.
This can be great stuff, some of the best in life, even without children, and one night stands are nothing like the same. The article omitted nearly all the really good stuff.
For some reason being independent (able to buy what I want, when I want it and work 20 hours a day) is better than rising a family and having children. Things that are after all, the reason of what as species, are suppose to be doing in this planet.
The signal is then clear, you fail to do that, but being to extinct. This is exactly what begins where this trends are prevalent. Perhaps we need to rethink the roles and if being independent is something that in the long term will create more value for the group.
[1] "Normal" a defined by a given society.
Edit: removed a comparison of the parent poster's argument to "violent video games make people violent".
I dont think i'm confused about causality here. If you cant get excited unless you see or do extreme stuff, you're going to have a pretty difficult libido,as in reality not that many women are willing to "perfom" these "stunts".
I dont think one needs to be already interested in extreme fetish in order to get hooked to it,the more one looks at porn the more one seeks extreme stuffs. It's like any other addiction.
> I don't know what "v...t" or "o...p.....s"
Nevermind , i was saying that japanese porn is well known for its extreme fetish.
I agree, but my point was that people who see enough porn to get to the really weird stuff are probably more likely the ones who didn't care for real-life relationships already (in a society where these two things a correlated).
Edit: clarity.
My job was to source content and manage a mobile video website. that's when i got exposed to JAV. So a business we worked with sent us "classic" JAV. And frankly , it was the most extreme stuff i saw back then. There is definetly something cultural. I think japanese get exposed to stuff we would label as extreme , yet for the business i was dealing with it was normal JAV.
And i'm from a country which is quite open minded about sex(one of our first lady was an ex model who did nude photos, i dont think it would be ok in US).
Citation needed. One could easily argue that the ready availability of "extreme" porn is what keeps the Japanese rape (and indeed general crime) rates so low.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=XV4...
Basically, you have a bunch of old people around, and nobody to support them, or fuel the society.
And after a certain point, you can't reverse it, and you no longer have a viable society.
Deleted comment
http://fistfulofeuros.net/afoe/staring-into-the-ukrainian-ec...
Population decline is multifaceted and rather important - countries that experience it don't seem to bounce back, and it has far reaching economic implications.
At first "acquire users manually", then later you can automate the sexual process. I promise to apply these concepts when I go to Japan.
(Sorry, I'll just get my coat ...)
Talk about blurred lines.
o driving cars with tires that last only 15,000 miles,
o driving cars with engines that last only 80,000 miles (due to poor lubrication due to water and gasoline in the oil due to inaccurate fuel mixture and ignition),
o typing on typewriters with carbon paper,
o doing business communications with printing and/or typing on paper sent by USPS,
o an office telephone switchboard manned by employees.
Now enter new technology, and each of these activities uses some automation, is much cheaper, and puts the old employees out of work.
So, have lots of unemployed people with little or no money who want to make money and consume but cannot get jobs.
Why not jobs? For one, the total number of jobs shrank, and as in musical chairs some people don't get one.
For another, to create more jobs need some ideas for new products/services, some capital to get the businesses going, and some qualified employees. The unemployed people will need some new training, that is, investments in 'human capital'.
As we know from depressions, can have a shortage of capital, lots of people not consuming who want to work but no jobs for them to do. Then if have a war, suddenly can have three jobs for everyone who can work at all.
There is also an effect of the ratios of people to land and other natural resources. With high density population, the prices of such resources increase. Maybe when the population of Japan, Finland, France, Germany, Russia, the US, etc. shrink, the new ratio will make it easier for a couple to form a family. E.g., if the population is low enough that a young couple can easily buy 200 acres of good farm land, then there will be some new alternatives for that couple to form a family. Now at maybe $5000 an acre, let's, see, 200 acres would be $1 million. She's 18; he's 22; and where are they going to get $1 million or even a down payment plus farm equipment and materials for a house?
Presumably in time startups will find new products and services that people want and that can make use of the unemployed.
But, in that town when automation put the typists out of work, the jobs of some people were not affected and, first cut, by having the company spend much less on typing, could pay their remaining employees more. So, some people are doing well.
And in Japan, the article seems to suggest that real estate prices are so high that no one can afford them! No! Instead, real estate prices are so high just because enough people actually can afford them. So, some people are doing well, and maybe they, or their lucky heirs, are forming traditional families.
I suspect that weird exists in any population of sufficient size.
This baby dearth, combined with the ability of the japanese to keep their elites from increasing mass immigration, means less supply of labor, which means higher wage (remember supply and demand? It applies to labor, too). That means that the corporations that support the corporate media via advertising buys will pay more for labor. The media hates that!
Also, fewer people means fewer consumers for the products advertised in the media. The media hates that!
The media is the enemy of the majority working class citizen of the developed nations.
I'm willing to bet a lot of money that the low-birth rate trend will reverse at some point. A country with 1.2 birth rate will cease to exist in 200 years, and I just don't see that happening.
More interesting questions to ask is:
1. What will trigger the trend reversal, and make young people reproduce more? (My guess is, vast reduction in standard of living and GDP)
2. And how long will it take for Japan to recover from the damage sustained?
In a long run, I think Japan can pull it off. It will be in better shape than Europe 50 years from now.
Of course to a sexually repressed Brit walking through Shibuya with a childish smirk and a hard-on surrounded by sexually voracious vixens (in his mind at least), sex is everywhere and needs to at least be a sub theme on any reporting on Japan. Cringeworthy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbivore_men
Can you imagine a survey in any Western country where even 36% of young men would willingly fess up to voluntarily avoiding any romantic relationships?
(And FWIW, I'm married to a Japanese woman, and our contribution to the birth rate is already above the national average.)
So they're basically hippies, although for cultural reasons the girls don't think their hippies are cool, so they get less sex not more.
One interesting effect of huge rates of freeters and neets is some segment of the salarymen feel they're just one bad review or whatever from permanent downgrade into freeter / neet status, or at least the girls may think that about them. So the percentage of people behaving like freeters / neets probably is somewhat larger than the demographic percentage of freeter/neets.
Well, no girl my age would ever have anything to do with me because I'm poor and have no future, so, uh, yeah I'm not looking thats the story I'll tell so I feel a little better. Pout and quit is hardly unknown in the west "Oh so you guys are cheating and stacking the game against me, well F you I'm taking my (two) balls and going home". Although with the decline of casual neighborhood play this might be an unknown social situation for our young... In the past it was not unheard of, screw over the kid who brought the tennis ball and he takes it and goes home and no one plays...
Don't end up like a teen parent, don't have relationships and kids until you can afford it... well, what if the economic deck is stacked such that 25% will never, ever be able to afford it? Well, until the inevitable revolution, you'll get weird things like young people not having sex.
Finally the whole topic is super hetro-normative so I think we can all safely assume at least 5% or so are in the closet.
So 5% in closet, in 2000, in better times, 10% were NEETs per govt figures, in better times 30% were freeters (some of whom do get some...) maybe 10% of salarymen (or more precisely, the girls checking them out) accurately or inaccurately believe they're one unlucky event away from permanent downgrade into freeter/neet (is there significant upward mobility in Japan from freeter/neet? Not that I've read/heard?) So that's 55% right there although some of the freeters ARE probably getting some. Of course not everyone reacts to being screwed over by withdrawing; in the US they sometimes go out shooting, etc. Fixing the withdrawl problem without fixing the economic stressors is likely just to result in different negative social reactions WRT weapons etc.
Well I'm from Australia and according to the sensationalist press some not insignificant proportion of men are actively avoiding marriage, and Sydney is supposedly seething with 30something year old women unable to find a mate (despite their willingness to go out hunting in packs on a Saturday night).
BBC go your hardest.