But I bet they will continue to work people to the bone as a point of pride…like I wonder what could be contributing to this problem.
This right here. It’s not that people don’t want kids. It’s that they’re at their breaking point already.
Even if you provide good living conditions and incentives to people they will choose to not have enough kids to sustain the population if they’re given the choice. Statistics from the past 100 years clearly show it in all rich and even poor countries.
We reached 8 billions humans because people, especially women, didn’t have any other choice.
Oh, you mean like Karoshi? The term that translates to “overwork death”? Good times. Good times.
They’ve got women’s rights but they hate immigration, this outcome is inevitable regardless of socioeconomic equality among native born.
This problem is not isolated to Japan. Countries all across the world are facing the same issue and have been for a number of years.
Create a shitty, miserable, society with no rights or support, and people do not want to bring children into it… who’d guess?
The flannel has been wrung dry to the detriment of the working class; there is no where to go, no more water to squeeze from them. This is global society / capitalism falling apart.
Exactly its not some mysterious problem no matter how much the government and media try to frame it as one, people of the age to have kids have no time for kids and no money for kids so no wonder they have no desire for kids.
Even if they did want children, without the support systems, it may not be feasible for them to have kids. Having them might mean choosing to starve or go without a house.
Even if you’re in a country with a public health care system, a sick/young child means having to take time off work to care for them.
Capitalism is the best we’ve got. Even North Korea has acknowledged this. With other systems people starve en masse. My hope is that we get over the taboo of regulation. Capitalism fucks up real-estate and wealth distribution. And health-care should 100% be government funded.
It seems like you already understand some of the limitations of capitalism. Look into why regulation has gradually been rolled back in the US since the 70s. Why did politicians start to agree with corporate execs demands for lower regulation. Keywords to look up - regulatory capture.
On a separate point, there’s plenty of famines that have occurred in capitalist economies due to capitalist exploitation - that is make more money, at the cost of of creating a famine. Some estimates put the deaths due to famines under capitalism higher than those under socialism. I used to simply know only of the famines under socialism and not know of the famines under capitalism.
Finally the capitalism we live in since the Great Depression is significantly different than the capitalism before it. Socialists, actual Marxists in western counties, yes the US included, were actively involved in the policies that created the welfare states across the west along with the regulatory regime. Some of FDR’s economic advisors were Marxian economists.
That was the compromise to save capitalism from imminent worker revolution. The unregulated, no-safety-net version of the system had lead to the conditions for such revolution. The socialist policies that averted the revolution in have slowly been dismantled over time and the system is reverting to the pre-Great Depression state. Faster in some countries than others.
If you want to reform capitalism to the point where it can no longer revert to economic liberalism (free market fundamentalism), you’d have to almost completely eliminate wealth accumulation. You could only do that by changing the ownership of the means of production. E.g. all employees in all corporations become equal owners (or controllers) of the machines and therefore the decisions on sharing the wealth those machines produce, instead of those decisions being made by a tiny number of major shareholders. You’d also have to significantly expand the industries operated by the government. At that point you end up with socialism. And yes socialism doesn’t mean central planning and no markets. Capitalism doesn’t mean no central planning and just markets. We do plenty of central planning in capitalist economies across governments and large corporations.
I’m not asking you to change your mind today. Just pointing out a few things to look into in case you haven’t.
Seems super likely that capitalism is going to be a major factor in our extinction. Maybe we could have a bit less of it and actually survive as a species
I actually agree with this. Capitalism presumes infinite resources.
The major shareholders have voted down your proposal.
Huge amount of japanese descent people in Brazil (including me), but I have the feeling the japanese would rather have their country implode than give us nationality
I guess it’s not limited to Brazil or black people. Any change in their routine seems very complicated.
Who mentioned black people?
I assume they were making a point about nationalism and racism in Japan, which is strong to say the least. Especially against dark skinned people.
I assume their comment had nothing to do with Brazil.
Japanese don’t. Unless it’s one of them in blackface.
Seriously, the racism there is painful.
No one has time for family in Japan
When I watch yt videos about people leaving the workplace at 10pm, I wonder how suicide rate isn’t way higher
There’s a reason so much anime these days is a salaryman dying on the job and reincarnating into a fantasy world.
deleted by creator
In the context of Capitalism, sure, Japan is in trouble.
But then again, any system that demands infinite growth within a finite system has a biological parallel… in cancer. Yes, capitalism is economic cancer.
Japan has a bright future in front of it, if it can successfully pioneer an effective degrowth system that prioritizes the lives of people over Paraiste-Class profits.
Is cancer really cancer if the rest of the body can adapt and grow faster than it? You describe capitalism as a finite system and then heavily imply that we’re near the outer boundary of that system or that all current and future resources are almost depleted.
You describe capitalism as a finite system
No, I did not. Capitalism demands infinite growth. This planet is a finite system
and then heavily imply that we’re near the outer boundary of that system or that all current and future resources are almost depleted.
I don’t imply. I simply state a known fact. Anyone with even a passing exposure to economics and resource extraction would be very familiar with this fact.
For example, 100 years ago, the energy within a barrel of oil could extract an additional 300 barrels of oil from the ground. These days, despite technology that has made the process massively more efficient, we get barely 10 barrels of oil out of the ground for that same amount of energy expended.
These days same goes for almost every other resource you could possibly shake a stick at, from minerals such as steel and copper, over harvested materials such as fish and wood, and all the way down to agriculture, where the topsoil that almost all of our crops depend on will be completely depleted within the next 60 years, and will be depleted in most agricultural regions within the next 20-40.
Capitalism is a cancer, and it’s killing the planet.
I still don’t understand the obsession. Not everything has to be a ponzi scheme where line go up. Things can shrink, it’s ok. Not everything lasts forever. At some point you can abandon areas and let them decay.
If the Japanese want people to work 80 hour weeks (and go drinking with their boss every night) maybe they should make polyamorous marriage a thing. Kids are a lot easier to deal with if you have help.
That’s certainly a take on “family business”.
A lot of countries are headed there. America isn’t keeping their population growth in the replacement category either. Why do you think abortion and immigration are such an issue in America? They want the white people reproducing, not the immigrants. Wherever there is a super strict, racist or almost racist, immigration policy, look at their population growth.
Turns out isolationist culture doesn’t stand the test of time. Who knew?
That’s not the main problem here.
Oh? You could optionally expand instead of just stopping at what the problem isn’t.
Other comments had it so I didn’t think it was necessary. Immigration can prop up a low birthrate but that can’t last forever. Need to actually have a culture that supports procreation. And Japan doesn’t really have that. Their work culture is directly responsible for it. I don’t think that’s something easily fixed. Financial incentives could help, but unless it’s pretty hefty it probably wouldn’t be enough.
Australia had a baby bonus for a while. It was a payment you’d get for giving birth to a child. I believe it was like $3K.
It did for a few hundred years before they became a vassal state of the US … and wouldn’t you know it the US is also in a birth rate crisis.
Isolationist culture is fine, you just can’t mix it with the crushing reality of capitalism and it’s negative effects on the ability of people to raise families.
Good. We need to depopulate by 50%. The earth can’t have 8 billion people. There are less than 30,000 polar bears in the whole world.
Carrying capacity of the earth is something like 15 billion with current technology, our wastefulness and overconsumption (of the rich, globally speaking) is the problem. Which reduction in population can mitigate, but not fix
I love Japan, but I will say it has its issues that often get overlooked. Workplace culture is horrific in Japan and it contributes to their high suicide rates. There’s even a word in Japanese that specifically refers to a person dying from being overworked. I know friends who immigrated to Japan, only to regret it because they saw for themselves just how harsh the workplace culture was. Japanese people have no time for their family. Something must change or this problem is going to get worse but given it’s a highly conservative culture I’m not sure it’s going to see changes anytime soon.
Jokes on you
America has higher rates of overwork and suicide!
Yeah but it’s not exactly fair to compare the US to a developed country
It has two actually, karoshi and karojisatsu, death from being overworked and suicide from being overworked. Etimologically speaking, that gives you some idea of how big the problem is, kind of like the old adage about eskimos or inuits having six words for “snow”.
Known I am a bit obtuse, or perhaps litteral, but I am Norwegian and have more words for snow. Think English have more words for snow. Think texture. Powder, sleet, sugary, slush, crusty, hoar, rime.
Why is their workplace harsh?
Is it conservative because old people outnumber the young people and have for so long? You give a dominant demographic enough influence over time, they’ll try to make the rest of society like them. Old.
Also, is it so old because Japan has a really high life expectancy? Or has that been taken into account?
It’s cultural. Japanese are less individualistic than the west. They live their lives that is more geared toward what will help the community and not just themselves. Less than hundred years ago they viewed their emperor as a living god. So back then the Japanese were indoctrinated to live their lives in service of the emperor. Basically how North Koreans treat their leader today, which is a cultural remnant from Japan since Korea was a Japanese colony. (That the imperial family are descendants from gods is an 8th century myth and was reintroduced during the Meiji restoration. Before the Meiji restoration the Japanese didn’t give a fuck about the imperial family)
So that cultural attitude still lives today in a watered down form. Instead of serving the emperor it’s about serving the community and country. And of course corporations can’t help themselves but to exploit that. That attitude has been fading with every generation after the war but it’s still so deeply ingrained that corporations can easily manipulate their workers.
Oh no, not our out of control population growth fueled by resources running out as I type this comment and causing unspeakable damage to the biosphere of the planet.
Whatever will we do if our numbers fall below 7 billion.
I’m sure artificially lowering female med student’s grades to increase drop-outs amoung women will help with the financial stability and job security needed to raise a child!
They seem to be electing a lot of nationalist anti-immigration cucks. Maybe they should try to fix the problem instead of endlessly complaining about it.
Expecting Japan to ever really throw off the yoke of the LDP is expecting too much.
Give them some days off.
