“At least Japan has the option to recover peacefully, if they’re willing to take the necessary steps.”
The only thing that could save them would be to persuade—or compel—Japanese women to start having 5-10 children each. And I’m not sure it isn’t too late even for that.
My wife and I got about $3,000 from the Japanese government upon the births of each of our children. Young Japanese people regard that as a trivial sum in comparison with the cost of raising children.
I agree, they do need to start having 5 kids, at a minimum. It is very, very, difficult to recover from a crashing population, as you have far fewer women of child-bearing age to even have kids.
I also agree that $3,000 is a joke. They might as well not bother. I think Singapore is $20,000, which is getting to the point where it can affect behavior. If it were up to me, in Japan, I’d start at $10k for the first kid, $20k for #2, and maybe $40k for any amount above that (maybe up to 10 kids).
The part that Western governments don’t seem to understand is that once you give women equal access to the workplace, many will do just that - and thus take themselves out of the motherhood track (or, often, limit themselves to one trophy child). So you really have 2 choices: Go back to the days when women were excluded from career jobs, or give women a financial incentive to stay home and have kids. Right now, Singapore is doing a bit of that, but still the money has to be bigger. In the US, it would be harder, because guess which groups would be most likely to take advantage of incentives like that...