Posted on 08/16/2023 9:11:30 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
TOKYO -- Up to 42% of Japanese women born in 2005 could end up not having children in their lifetimes, according to a government estimate, a high percentage that could threaten the future of its social security program.
Japan's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research gives this estimate for women born in 2005 under its low-birth scenario. In the medium scenario, 33.4% of this group will go through their childbearing years without having kids. In the most optimistic case, the rate will be 24.6%.
The percentage is even higher for men, who are more likely to be unmarried than women. As many as half of male 18-year-olds will never have children, the report estimates.
The share of people without children is rising in such other developed economies as the U.S. and Europe. This has been attributed to a shift in values as more people focus on self-fulfillment rather than having kids.
In these countries, around 10% to 20% of women born in 1970 never had children. The share in Japan is significantly higher at 27% and could end up at more than double Western levels if American and European rates stay around their current levels.
The trend of not having children has lost some momentum in the U.S., the U.K. and Germany over the past few years. Efforts to make it easier to balance work with raising a family have encouraged more people to opt for at least one child.
Japan has also been trying to create a better environment for prospective parents with measures like its work-style reforms.
But young people have become less interested in marriage and children amid stagnant wages and deep-seated uncertainty about the future. The institute's National Fertility Survey for 2021 found a surge in the number of unmarried young people who are fine with the idea of staying single for life.
While China and South Korea have seen birthrates plunge over the past several years, their declines started later than that of Japan, which is among the first to grapple with a rise in the population of older adults without children.
In Japan, hospitals and nursing care facilities require a family member to serve as a guarantor, and it can be difficult for those without relatives to rent homes.
"There needs to be an urgent discussion on building a social safety net in every area -- including pensions, medical care, nursing care and living assistance -- that does not disadvantage people without family, along with funding," said social security expert Takashi Oshio, a professor at Hitotsubashi University's Institute of Economic Research.
Fewer people—fewer soldiers—easy victory for China. Maybe Japan has had her day? Maybe they need to import people from other lands and become like other lands. Lots of folks in Africa and Asia would like to live in Japan.
Now young people are encouraged to:
1) Copulate indiscriminately, and abort the result.
2) Engage in sodomitic acts with persons of the same sex.
3) Mutilate themselves.
Declining birth rate will soon be a topic from the VAERS reports of Adverse Reactions to the CoVID experimental gene therapy, applied directly, or, as we are finding out, from shedding of the ‘spikes’ from a ‘vaccinated’ population.
This comes out of the old Japanese interpretation of Confucian ethics and family roles. In Confucianism, concern with money is considered unethical; this is why in Japan's hierarchy, the merchant is near the bottom (samurai, farmer, tradesman, merchant, outcasts). So the role of money-handler in the family was given to the wife, and in industrial/corporate times, that meant that the husband would have over his salary to the wife, the wife would give her husband an allowance which he could spend any way he wanted...and then it became her responsibility to cover all the home expenses with what was left.
This led to a whole host of social side effects. First, Japanese women are notorious skinflints, since it is they who lose face if the bills aren't paid; ironically, it is also why tatemae purchases, items that are to be seen, are always high-class (expenses purses, for example) to show how the woman handles the money so well as to afford such things, while items that aren't seen are always purchased at the lowest possible cost.
Second, a husband who doesn't provide enough is undesirable; a woman wants to marry someone who is going to go up the corporate ladder, who makes covering the household expenses easy. This also requires the husband, in Japan's pseudo-workaholic culture, to spend most of his time on the job, so the actual friendship between husband and wife is thoroughly unnecessary--a woman is not so much marrying a husband as hiring him.
Third, the wife's other role, which grows out of her running the finances, is to ensure the future success of the children. It is her job to get them through the best schools beginning with the best kindergarten through the best university, plus the best training in one of the arts (usually music). That turns the children into workaholics ("four hours pass, five hours fail" being the proverb of how much sleep you get in order to study hard enough) themselves, so that they can grow up to become the kind of woman who can get a financially-secure man, or the kind of man who can be financially secure enough to get a woman.
What has happened in the past generation is that young people have lost any personal sense of benefit from marriage. A woman who can make enough money on her own doesn't need to deal with a husband, a man who doesn't care about having children doesn't need to deal with a wife, and since most young people have left their hometowns for the big city, there is no neighborhood pushing for marriages and families.
Rampant abortion makes casual sex easy, and not living in a small town means no one is gossiping about you and making you lose face if you hook up.
The solution in Japan is the same as the solution here, even though the origins of our marital-less and childlessness are different. The concept of a marriage where two people who are equal before God with different roles with each other comes from Christianity, and the Japanese would have to turn to Christianity, with Americans returning to Christianity, in order to retrieve and live out that concept. In America, that necessitates a Third Awakening, but in Japan, which hasn't embraced Christianity since the 1500s, it will take a miracle.
Per converting, that is not going to happen in Japan.
A common thing there also is that marital sex stops after kids. No guy gets married to stop having sex.
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