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Incredible Shrinking Country (Japan faces swift demographic collapse)
New York Times ^ | 04/28/2012 | By ROSS DOUTHAT

Posted on 04/29/2012 8:46:33 AM PDT by SeekAndFind

“THE Children of Men,” P. D. James’s 1992 novel, is set in a future where the world’s male population has become infertile, and an aging Britain is adapting to the human race’s gradual extinction. Women push dolls in baby carriages. Families baptize kittens. There are state-run “national porn shops” to stimulate the flagging male libido. Suicide flourishes. Immigrants are welcomed as guest laborers but expelled once they become too old to work. The last children born on earth — the so-called “Omegas” — have grown up to be bored, arrogant, antisocial and destructive.

James’s book, like most effective dystopias, worked by exaggerating existing trends — the plunge in birthrates across the developed world, the spread of voluntary euthanasia in nations like the Netherlands and Switzerland, the European struggle to assimilate a growing immigrant population.

But one developed nation is making “Children of Men” look particularly prophetic. In Japan, birthrates are now so low and life expectancy so great that the nation will soon have a demographic profile that matches that of the American retirement community of Palm Springs. “Gradually but relentlessly,” the demographer Nick Eberstadt writes in the latest issue of The Wilson Quarterly, “Japan is evolving into a type of society whose contours and workings have only been contemplated in science fiction.”

Eberstadt has spent years writing about the challenges posed by declining fertility around the globe. But Japan, he notes, is a unique case. The Japanese birthrate hovers around just 1.3 children per woman, far below the level required to maintain a stable population. Thanks to increasing life expectancy, by 2040 “there could almost be one centenarian on hand to welcome each Japanese newborn.” Over the same period, the overall Japanese population is likely to decline by 20 percent, with grim consequences for an already-stagnant economy

(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Japan; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: demographics; japan; population
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To: count-your-change
Japan is aborting itself out of existence.

Ah, I guess it was time for another fun round of "lets not read the article."

The problem is people not even having sex in the first place.

21 posted on 04/29/2012 9:37:00 AM PDT by Strategerist
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To: SeekAndFind

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) - Hundreds of protesters marched on Saturday in New York City against what they say are setbacks to equal rights and reproductive rights for women.

Saturday’s march against the “war on women” was one of dozens around the country.

Protesters marched from Washington Square down Broadway to Foley Square.

They chanted “Not the church, not the state, women must control their fate.”

Brenda Reiss says she was taking part in the protest because of efforts in several states to restrict access to abortion and contraception. She says women “will not be shoved back in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant.”

(Excerpt) Read more at newyork.cbslocal.com ...


22 posted on 04/29/2012 9:39:31 AM PDT by B212
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To: SeekAndFind

Read the comments at the original story. “There are too many people!”.....”There’s not enough food!”.....Fear of what might be has killed more people in the last couple of hundred years (i.e. communism, fascism, abortion, liberalism) then weapons have. Cowards......a generation of selfish, self-absorbed, self-serving cowards.....


23 posted on 04/29/2012 9:45:51 AM PDT by blueunicorn6 ("A crack shot and a good dancer")
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To: Altura Ct.
They should import millions of Africans.

Africans can't make a success of a Continent filled with natural resources - can you imagine the horror they would create after taking over an island without out ONE natural resource?

24 posted on 04/29/2012 9:46:25 AM PDT by GOPJ (Obama's father, grandfather and great-grandfather were polygamists.-ALL,including Obama ate dogs!!)
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To: B212

Hey Hey! Ho Ho!

Feminazis have to go!


25 posted on 04/29/2012 9:54:09 AM PDT by bert ((K.E. N.P. N.C. +12 ..... Present failure and impending death yield irrational action))
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To: Eric in the Ozarks

After Korea, my Dad was stationed in Japan where I learned what “Nisei” and “Sansei” meant, referring to the Americans among us who spoke no Japanese and bore only an ethnic resemblance to the local populace.

Later on when I learned the history of the 442d Regimental Combat Team in WWII, the heroics of that unit became easier to understand when I recalled the Nisei folks I had known.

Japan is Japan, and it is a very different place & culture from the rest of the world’s peoples of Japanese ancestry.


26 posted on 04/29/2012 10:01:11 AM PDT by elcid1970 (Nuke the Aswan High Dam, then nuke Mecca. Death to Islam means freedom for all mankind.")
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To: vladimir998
They have enough difficulty assimilating their own emigrants come home: http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=6996

From the article you linked: "Such people, Dr. Tsuda concluded, do not fit the usual notion of a transnational community."

The "usual notion" of the author is presumably that everyone should shed their cultural norms and join the faceless drones of international socialism.

27 posted on 04/29/2012 10:03:24 AM PDT by Praxeologue
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To: married21

Japanese Brazilians and Peruvians would be a source of potential immigrants.


28 posted on 04/29/2012 10:06:22 AM PDT by tbw2
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To: SeekAndFind; Morgana
There are state-run “national porn shops” to stimulate the flagging male libido

In a perverted country where children are sex objects (kiddie porn possession is legal)... who wants to have children? They obviously have no idea what the problem really is.

29 posted on 04/29/2012 10:24:04 AM PDT by GeronL (The Right to Life came before the Right to Pursue Happiness)
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To: central_va

I love Japanese humor, I love their anime, their people are attractive.

However, I know how much they like me.

We go to Korean shops to get everything Japanese because they will actually talk to us there.


30 posted on 04/29/2012 10:36:07 AM PDT by netmilsmom (I am Breitbart)
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To: SeekAndFind
I lived in Japan for 4 years. 1995-2000. I have seen the Japanese culture of the men go from warrior to sissy. The Japanese male uses more make-up than most women. They have become so metro-sexual, that they don't even think about marriage and having kids, and sex with a wife is ecky... They do like their comfort women and that is only about 3 to 4 times a year.
I would be sitting in a booth at a cafe’ and Japanese women,most of them young and beautiful would come and sit at my table and start talking in English to me. They would ask all kinds of question about my country, American culture and sooner or later, about sex. It seems that their boyfriends or husbands don't like having sex.....
What a pity that their males have lost....Lust....
31 posted on 04/29/2012 10:39:50 AM PDT by baddog 219
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To: martin_fierro; SeekAndFind
> Families baptize kittens.

Wait, was that wrong?

Easier than a bris.

32 posted on 04/29/2012 10:40:14 AM PDT by Slings and Arrows (You can't have Ingsoc without an Emmanuel Goldstein.)
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To: chessplayer

“Honshu, Japan’s largest island, has a population density of 1157 people per square mile, greater than that Rhode Island and about six times that of North Carolina. Who can blame the Japanese for wanting some space?”


Packed together like sardines. Thats healthy?

Yeah I saw that comment at the bottom of the article. However, they person who wrote it misses the point. The Japanese aren’t committing demographic suicide because they want more personal space. They’re doing it because as a people they’ve lost the desire to be a people. Its a lot more complicated than that, but that’s the executive summary.


33 posted on 04/29/2012 10:47:18 AM PDT by happyathome
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To: Slings and Arrows

He was a brave man who first baptized a kitten.

But not as brave as the man who first circumcised one.

[doffs hat and bows head]


34 posted on 04/29/2012 10:56:03 AM PDT by RichInOC (Palin 2012: The Perfect Storm.)
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To: chessplayer

At that density we could stuff the world’s population into the USA and Canada.


35 posted on 04/29/2012 11:07:00 AM PDT by ctdonath2 ($1 meals: http://abuckaplate.blogspot.com/)
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To: chessplayer

That’s one person per half acre. Sustainable, if not comfortable.


36 posted on 04/29/2012 11:09:50 AM PDT by ctdonath2 ($1 meals: http://abuckaplate.blogspot.com/)
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To: Strategerist

I don’t have access to the bedrooms of the Japanese people so I wouldn’t know about their sexual habits, however....the figures on abortion are available even if not precise.
Perhaps the aborted were all conceived by IVF or something?


37 posted on 04/29/2012 11:11:37 AM PDT by count-your-change (You don't have to be brilliant, not being stupid is enough.)
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To: B212

>> They chanted “Not the church, not the state, women must control their fate.”

I wonder if the LORD finds that amusing. Or not.


38 posted on 04/29/2012 11:12:36 AM PDT by Nervous Tick (Trust in God, but row away from the rocks!)
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To: RichInOC

It’s tough being an early adopter.


39 posted on 04/29/2012 11:13:19 AM PDT by Slings and Arrows (You can't have Ingsoc without an Emmanuel Goldstein.)
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To: TexasFreeper2009

A friend is having her 14th. They’re doing fine, though living on a farm helps a lot of the food costs.


40 posted on 04/29/2012 11:13:23 AM PDT by ctdonath2 ($1 meals: http://abuckaplate.blogspot.com/)
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