Why do you think it exclusively a Japanese problem? Nearly every western nation is experiencing the same set of trends, Japan just happened to get their first.

Why do you think it exclusively a Japanese problem? Nearly every western nation is experiencing the same set of trends, Japan just happened to get their first. One part of the problem is that this is so compartmentalized. If you work at a place where people have children... they all have children for the most part. If you work at a place where they don't have children, then nearly all of them are childless (or have just the one). Same for non-work social lives. This means there's some significant fraction of people who look around them and can't notice that it's happening here in the US too, their own personal experience contradicts the trend too thoroughly for them to believe it to be some sort of fluke. In Japan, at a guess, I'd say that exact nature of the discouragement, they just keep putting the pressure on that "here are the 10,000 things you must do first" until children become an impossible achievement.