9 ms·

Japan readies ‘last hope’ measures to stop falling births

39 points by Balgair 4y ago

rayiner 4y ago
Asian societies turned population control into a quasi-religious endeavor in the 1960s and are now paying the price. Japan’s fertility rate peaked at well over 5 in the beginning of the 20th century. In just 40 years, from 1925 to 1965, it fell to just over 2. But it shot right past replacement levels, down to 1.4 today. It’s not going to be easy to overcome decades of socialization telling people that not having kids is the pathway to prosperity. Even countries like Bangladesh will start shrinking in this century. I’m less worried about those because (1) I think Islam provides some back-pressure to keep birth rates from collapsing totally as in countries like South Korea; and (2) Bangladesh and India are quite a bit more densely populated than Japan, which really isn’t that crowded.
- quelltext 4y ago
  What kind of population control did Japan engage in in the 60s?
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    The really terrible kind. Japanese doctors made a big chunk of their money performing abortions. They lobbied to outlaw most forms of birth control, because it interfered with their abortion revenue. There are plenty of stories of Japanese doctors saying, “Your pregnancy test is positive, when should we schedule the abortion?” This wasn’t formal government policy, but the government did support it. The birth control pill wasn’t legalized in Japan until the 1999. Plan B wasn’t legalized until 2011. Abortion by medication is still illegal.
    - vlovich123 4y ago
      I agree if there would be more birth control there would be fewer abortions and I agree it sucks that abortion by medication is still illegal. It sounds inhuman. I'm missing though the jump you're making as to how that would result in more births unless you're suggesting that you ban birth control and abortions but that doesn't seem like your position.
      - pyuser583 4y ago
        > I'm missing though the jump you're making as to how that would result in more births Did I say that it resulted in more births? I don’t think it did.
        vlovich123 4y ago
        Here's the conversation I read. >>> Asian societies turned population control into a quasi-religious endeavor in the 1960s and are now paying the price >> What kind of population control did Japan engage in in the 60s? > Your response about no prescription abortions and birth control but instead doctors push abortions. I'm totally missing your point about how Japan is engaging in population control. For example, if prescription abortions were legal and they pushed birth control instead, is the net effect a meaningful change in policy that would prevent them from "now paying the price"? I guess I'm totally missing how your criticism of their policies relates back to the original discussion that Japan's low birth rates are a result of population control and how addressing the critique you wrote would in any way change their birth rate.
        pyuser583 4y ago
        A culture where doctors respond to a positive pregnancy test by asking when (not if) to schedule an abortion is likely to lead to fewer births.
    - eyphka 4y ago
      Wow that's insane, is there any references or reading on this? Tried to find sources and having difficulty.
      - red-iron-pine 4y ago
        here let me google that for you. "japan birth control policy" came up with this VERY detailed NIH discussion of Pst-WW2 Japanese birth control policy. literally first hit. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK402326/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK402326/
      - pyuser583 4y ago
        Sadly, many of my sources, including the story of a western woman who was asked by her Japanese doctor when she wanted to schedule the abortion, are no longer googleable. Even specific very specific queries aren’t returning anything. It seems search engines are focusing more on what they want to show you, rather than what you want to see.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  I don't think population control in the 60s is the issue now, rather like in North America, the way life and work is structured is not conducive to raising a family, and so many people have opted out of that.
  - Supermancho 4y ago
    Linear optimization within capitalism. Finding the most reliable path to success. I am left with no family.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    The sharpest drop in the US birth rate came after the baby boom, from 1960 to 1980, and was almost certainly a product of changing norms rather than economic pressure.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > The sharpest drop in the US birth rate came after the baby boom, from 1960 to 1980, and was almost certainly a product of changing norms rather than economic pressure. Economic conditions are a powerful factor in shaping norms, though in industrialized countries economic stability and stronger social safety nets are associated with reduced birthrates, “economic pressure” is thus more likely to be the opposite of the explanation.
      - tptacek 4y ago
        I mean, in the sense that the birth rate used to be enormous because children were part of the subsistence farming labor force, yes. But the norm change here is pretty clear, and pretty clearly not a product of economic pressure; I'm being careful with my words so as not to set the thread off on a bleak tangent.
        xyzzyz 4y ago
        Subsistence farming has been a marginal activity even in colonial North America, and that was even more true in United States. It was mostly restricted to native Americans. The rest were overwhelmingly engaged in market farming, not subsistence — either as owners, hired laborers, or slaves. In any case, by 1960, US society was overwhelmingly urbanized, and subsistence farming has faded from living memory.
hulitu 4y ago
[flagged]
eldritch_4ier 4y ago
What’s really the downside of falling birth rates (as long as they stabilize, and they obviously will)? In real terms as far as I can tell: young having to support more old and less competitive on the world stage. There’s not many complaints from the news about those though. What they complain about is how wages will increase as labor supply tightens (hence the push for more and more immigration) and business profits will fall. So many Ponzi schemes will become ineffective. In other words, it’s going to be harder to be a rich person. Why should we have to sell out our culture via mass immigration to protect the rich and their market sizes?
- goosedragons 4y ago
  You have a lot of old people that can't work and not enough people to take care of them and also run the country.
  - jmoak3 4y ago
    In a nutshell, it’s hard to design and build new kinds of solar panels when the scientists have to take mom to the doctor 3x a week Now imagine those scientists manage to have 3 kids a piece - what do you think is getting put on the back burner?
- H_Pylori 4y ago
  [dead]
- xrd 4y ago
  I wanted to ask basically the same question. Isn't it possible that the old models of population growth won't be true in the future? People relocate more, we have better tools for communication and collaboration. I'm curious why there isn't a path to prosperity, especially since we can watch what is happening long before the effects are felt.
- jiscariot 4y ago
  You have lots of things such as pensions, social security that have embedded growth obligations. Like a ponzi-scheme, everything is cool, so long as you grow the number of people paying in. Instead of reevaluating the economic foundations of these EGO schemes and ask if they are sustainable, it's easier to blame people not having children or countries that don't want open boarders, and call it a crisis.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Claude_Shannon 4y ago
"The prime minister said the plan was to double the budget for child-rearing policies, focusing on three pillars: economic support, child care services and reform of working styles."
- bsder 4y ago
  Double a currently lousy budget amount isn't even close to being good enough. One of THE biggest problems is that women wind up carrying the weight of both sets of elderly parents in Japan. Why should a woman get married and double her burden for an indefinite amount of time--often longer than raising a child! You need elder care support and services in order to free up the younger generation to actually have children. At the end, it's all about money. Society is going to have to funnel a whopping amount of money at young women to convince them to take on all the downsides of getting pregnant and raising a family.
paradox242 4y ago
Opened this article and immediately did a ctrl+f for 'immigration'. Not surprised to find only one hit toward the end where it is acknowledged as something that "might" be necessary. Of course no society is forced to welcome outsiders, and from my very detached anthropological view on the situation, it looks like the Japanese would rather die (slowly, and then perhaps very suddenly as the weight of their society can no longer be borne by the next generation) than change.
- superdisk 4y ago
  If you've ever seen how their society operates, you'd know there's a reason to preserve it rather than sell out and destroy it to appease the economy gods.
  - thequadehunter 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - rayiner 4y ago
    It’s amazing what you can do when everyone is socialized into a consistent set of values from childhood, and raised by parents who were socialized the same way. It’s a marvelous society—coming back from Tokyo to New York City is viscerally upsetting. It’s very sad to see the situation they’re in.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Immigration is a short term solution to a long term problem. Global fertility rate is only 2.4. Anything below 2.1 is a shrinking population. Yea, Japan could borrow population from China, but they will just be shrinking that population. Some countries in Africa still have significant positive fertility rates, but that is expected to drop dramatically if/as standards of living are increased. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fertility-rate https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fer...
- shortcake27 4y ago
  This is an extremely patriotic view. Why should people do something they don’t want to do just to ensure the survival of their society/country? The future of society is irrelevant to people who have already decided to be childfree and live the life they want today. “Oooh you’re so selfish” hell yeah I am. I get one life why would I waste it doing something I don’t want to do for a future I won’t even see? Edit: thanks for the downvotes without explanation. If you have a blanket expectation for other people to live their lives according to your ideologies (even if it makes them unhappy), perhaps take a second to consider what you’re asking of them.
julianlam 4y ago
The article shows a graph of reasons why Japanese respondents were not having children. Roughly ~22% (can't tell due to the graphical nature) responded "Struggling to conceive". If you have a full FIFTH of your population willing but not able to have children, that's a lower hanging fruit to pick than somehow incentivising people who don't want to have children to change their mind. Fertility treatment is almost never brought up... as though it were taboo. That needs to change. The cost of an IVF cycle is somewhere around $20,000 USD. It's a huge cost to bear as an individual, it's a drop in the bucket for a government, and pays for itself many times over when the conceived child enters the workforce.
- slaw 4y ago
  Struggling to conceive is the result of starting too late in their life to have children. > A woman's fertility peaks lasts during the twenties and first half of thirties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_maternal_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_maternal_age
  - lostlogin 4y ago
    *for some, or even many. Not all.
    - red-iron-pine 4y ago
      Not all indeed. But across a population of millions, that has a serious impact. The US has 330 million people, and assuming a roughly equal split means you're looking at ~165 million Men and 165 million women. Assume that 1/3 of those 165 million women are able to have kids -- they're not too young, or post-menopausal. That's ~55 million women who can have kids. If there is even a tiny amount of issues with being over age, like that only impacts 1-4% of pregnant women, that's still anywhere form 0.5 to 2.2 million pregnancies. 2 million babies that are going to not happen, or have problems. There are US states with fewer people. Even a tiny variance here can impact large populations greatly.
  - dumbotron 4y ago
jelliclesfarm 4y ago
I am surprised that no one is talking about Hiroshima and its possible impact on Japan’s falling birth rate. The Axis countries of Germany, Japan and Italy have particularly steep declines in population with current generations simply unwilling to procreate. To not consider the impact of WW2 is a mistake. It’s not about fertility, it is about being defeated.
- TheGigaChad 4y ago
  [dead]
mc32 4y ago
"the plan was to double the budget for child-rearing policies, focusing on three pillars: economic support, child care services and reform of working styles." If you want it to work, ten-fold the budget or focus it in one administrative zone and see how it does. Doing it half-heartedly isn't going to help. You need to guarantee an 18 to 20 year commitment to the program so that potential parents have assurance.
Georgelemental 4y ago
Originally published at https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Asia-Insight/Japan-readies-last-hope-measures-to-stop-falling-births https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Asia-Insight/Japan-readies...
Blackthorn 4y ago
They'll do absolutely anything except try to make the economy better for young people.

39 points by Balgair 4y ago

Asian societies turned population control into a quasi-religious endeavor in the 1960s and are now paying the price. Japan’s fertility rate peaked at well over 5 in the beginning of the 20th century. In just 40 years, from 1925 to 1965, it fell to just over 2. But it shot right past replacement levels, down to 1.4 today. It’s not going to be easy to overcome decades of socialization telling people that not having kids is the pathway to prosperity. Even countries like Bangladesh will start shrinking in this century. I’m less worried about those because (1) I think Islam provides some back-pressure to keep birth rates from collapsing totally as in countries like South Korea; and (2) Bangladesh and India are quite a bit more densely populated than Japan, which really isn’t that crowded.

quelltext 4y ago
What kind of population control did Japan engage in in the 60s?
- pyuser583 4y ago
  The really terrible kind. Japanese doctors made a big chunk of their money performing abortions. They lobbied to outlaw most forms of birth control, because it interfered with their abortion revenue. There are plenty of stories of Japanese doctors saying, “Your pregnancy test is positive, when should we schedule the abortion?” This wasn’t formal government policy, but the government did support it. The birth control pill wasn’t legalized in Japan until the 1999. Plan B wasn’t legalized until 2011. Abortion by medication is still illegal.
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    I agree if there would be more birth control there would be fewer abortions and I agree it sucks that abortion by medication is still illegal. It sounds inhuman. I'm missing though the jump you're making as to how that would result in more births unless you're suggesting that you ban birth control and abortions but that doesn't seem like your position.
    - pyuser583 4y ago
      > I'm missing though the jump you're making as to how that would result in more births Did I say that it resulted in more births? I don’t think it did.
      - vlovich123 4y ago
        Here's the conversation I read. >>> Asian societies turned population control into a quasi-religious endeavor in the 1960s and are now paying the price >> What kind of population control did Japan engage in in the 60s? > Your response about no prescription abortions and birth control but instead doctors push abortions. I'm totally missing your point about how Japan is engaging in population control. For example, if prescription abortions were legal and they pushed birth control instead, is the net effect a meaningful change in policy that would prevent them from "now paying the price"? I guess I'm totally missing how your criticism of their policies relates back to the original discussion that Japan's low birth rates are a result of population control and how addressing the critique you wrote would in any way change their birth rate.
        pyuser583 4y ago
        A culture where doctors respond to a positive pregnancy test by asking when (not if) to schedule an abortion is likely to lead to fewer births.
  - eyphka 4y ago
    Wow that's insane, is there any references or reading on this? Tried to find sources and having difficulty.
    - red-iron-pine 4y ago
      here let me google that for you. "japan birth control policy" came up with this VERY detailed NIH discussion of Pst-WW2 Japanese birth control policy. literally first hit. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK402326/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK402326/
    - pyuser583 4y ago
      Sadly, many of my sources, including the story of a western woman who was asked by her Japanese doctor when she wanted to schedule the abortion, are no longer googleable. Even specific very specific queries aren’t returning anything. It seems search engines are focusing more on what they want to show you, rather than what you want to see.
LegitShady 4y ago
I don't think population control in the 60s is the issue now, rather like in North America, the way life and work is structured is not conducive to raising a family, and so many people have opted out of that.
- Supermancho 4y ago
  Linear optimization within capitalism. Finding the most reliable path to success. I am left with no family.
- tptacek 4y ago
  The sharpest drop in the US birth rate came after the baby boom, from 1960 to 1980, and was almost certainly a product of changing norms rather than economic pressure.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > The sharpest drop in the US birth rate came after the baby boom, from 1960 to 1980, and was almost certainly a product of changing norms rather than economic pressure. Economic conditions are a powerful factor in shaping norms, though in industrialized countries economic stability and stronger social safety nets are associated with reduced birthrates, “economic pressure” is thus more likely to be the opposite of the explanation.
    - tptacek 4y ago
      I mean, in the sense that the birth rate used to be enormous because children were part of the subsistence farming labor force, yes. But the norm change here is pretty clear, and pretty clearly not a product of economic pressure; I'm being careful with my words so as not to set the thread off on a bleak tangent.
      - xyzzyz 4y ago
        Subsistence farming has been a marginal activity even in colonial North America, and that was even more true in United States. It was mostly restricted to native Americans. The rest were overwhelmingly engaged in market farming, not subsistence — either as owners, hired laborers, or slaves. In any case, by 1960, US society was overwhelmingly urbanized, and subsistence farming has faded from living memory.

hulitu 4y ago

[flagged]

eldritch_4ier 4y ago

What’s really the downside of falling birth rates (as long as they stabilize, and they obviously will)? In real terms as far as I can tell: young having to support more old and less competitive on the world stage. There’s not many complaints from the news about those though. What they complain about is how wages will increase as labor supply tightens (hence the push for more and more immigration) and business profits will fall. So many Ponzi schemes will become ineffective. In other words, it’s going to be harder to be a rich person. Why should we have to sell out our culture via mass immigration to protect the rich and their market sizes?

goosedragons 4y ago
You have a lot of old people that can't work and not enough people to take care of them and also run the country.
- jmoak3 4y ago
  In a nutshell, it’s hard to design and build new kinds of solar panels when the scientists have to take mom to the doctor 3x a week Now imagine those scientists manage to have 3 kids a piece - what do you think is getting put on the back burner?
H_Pylori 4y ago
[dead]
xrd 4y ago
I wanted to ask basically the same question. Isn't it possible that the old models of population growth won't be true in the future? People relocate more, we have better tools for communication and collaboration. I'm curious why there isn't a path to prosperity, especially since we can watch what is happening long before the effects are felt.
jiscariot 4y ago
You have lots of things such as pensions, social security that have embedded growth obligations. Like a ponzi-scheme, everything is cool, so long as you grow the number of people paying in. Instead of reevaluating the economic foundations of these EGO schemes and ask if they are sustainable, it's easier to blame people not having children or countries that don't want open boarders, and call it a crisis.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Claude_Shannon 4y ago

"The prime minister said the plan was to double the budget for child-rearing policies, focusing on three pillars: economic support, child care services and reform of working styles."

bsder 4y ago
Double a currently lousy budget amount isn't even close to being good enough. One of THE biggest problems is that women wind up carrying the weight of both sets of elderly parents in Japan. Why should a woman get married and double her burden for an indefinite amount of time--often longer than raising a child! You need elder care support and services in order to free up the younger generation to actually have children. At the end, it's all about money. Society is going to have to funnel a whopping amount of money at young women to convince them to take on all the downsides of getting pregnant and raising a family.

paradox242 4y ago

Opened this article and immediately did a ctrl+f for 'immigration'. Not surprised to find only one hit toward the end where it is acknowledged as something that "might" be necessary. Of course no society is forced to welcome outsiders, and from my very detached anthropological view on the situation, it looks like the Japanese would rather die (slowly, and then perhaps very suddenly as the weight of their society can no longer be borne by the next generation) than change.

superdisk 4y ago
If you've ever seen how their society operates, you'd know there's a reason to preserve it rather than sell out and destroy it to appease the economy gods.
- thequadehunter 4y ago
  [flagged]
- rayiner 4y ago
  It’s amazing what you can do when everyone is socialized into a consistent set of values from childhood, and raised by parents who were socialized the same way. It’s a marvelous society—coming back from Tokyo to New York City is viscerally upsetting. It’s very sad to see the situation they’re in.
pixl97 4y ago
Immigration is a short term solution to a long term problem. Global fertility rate is only 2.4. Anything below 2.1 is a shrinking population. Yea, Japan could borrow population from China, but they will just be shrinking that population. Some countries in Africa still have significant positive fertility rates, but that is expected to drop dramatically if/as standards of living are increased. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fertility-rate https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fer...
shortcake27 4y ago
This is an extremely patriotic view. Why should people do something they don’t want to do just to ensure the survival of their society/country? The future of society is irrelevant to people who have already decided to be childfree and live the life they want today. “Oooh you’re so selfish” hell yeah I am. I get one life why would I waste it doing something I don’t want to do for a future I won’t even see? Edit: thanks for the downvotes without explanation. If you have a blanket expectation for other people to live their lives according to your ideologies (even if it makes them unhappy), perhaps take a second to consider what you’re asking of them.

julianlam 4y ago

The article shows a graph of reasons why Japanese respondents were not having children. Roughly ~22% (can't tell due to the graphical nature) responded "Struggling to conceive". If you have a full FIFTH of your population willing but not able to have children, that's a lower hanging fruit to pick than somehow incentivising people who don't want to have children to change their mind. Fertility treatment is almost never brought up... as though it were taboo. That needs to change. The cost of an IVF cycle is somewhere around $20,000 USD. It's a huge cost to bear as an individual, it's a drop in the bucket for a government, and pays for itself many times over when the conceived child enters the workforce.

slaw 4y ago
Struggling to conceive is the result of starting too late in their life to have children. > A woman's fertility peaks lasts during the twenties and first half of thirties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_maternal_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_maternal_age
- lostlogin 4y ago
  *for some, or even many. Not all.
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    Not all indeed. But across a population of millions, that has a serious impact. The US has 330 million people, and assuming a roughly equal split means you're looking at ~165 million Men and 165 million women. Assume that 1/3 of those 165 million women are able to have kids -- they're not too young, or post-menopausal. That's ~55 million women who can have kids. If there is even a tiny amount of issues with being over age, like that only impacts 1-4% of pregnant women, that's still anywhere form 0.5 to 2.2 million pregnancies. 2 million babies that are going to not happen, or have problems. There are US states with fewer people. Even a tiny variance here can impact large populations greatly.
- dumbotron 4y ago

jelliclesfarm 4y ago

I am surprised that no one is talking about Hiroshima and its possible impact on Japan’s falling birth rate. The Axis countries of Germany, Japan and Italy have particularly steep declines in population with current generations simply unwilling to procreate. To not consider the impact of WW2 is a mistake. It’s not about fertility, it is about being defeated.

TheGigaChad 4y ago
[dead]

mc32 4y ago

"the plan was to double the budget for child-rearing policies, focusing on three pillars: economic support, child care services and reform of working styles." If you want it to work, ten-fold the budget or focus it in one administrative zone and see how it does. Doing it half-heartedly isn't going to help. You need to guarantee an 18 to 20 year commitment to the program so that potential parents have assurance.

Georgelemental 4y ago

Originally published at https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Asia-Insight/Japan-readies-last-hope-measures-to-stop-falling-births https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Asia-Insight/Japan-readies...

Blackthorn 4y ago

They'll do absolutely anything except try to make the economy better for young people.