[DeaconBenjamin]

Paul Marx, of Human Life International, once observed that people will not have children for the state.

[CROSSHIGHWAYMAN]

Japan might have to outsource more jobs to the USA.

How ironic.

[opinionator]

Maybe China and Japan, with their respective 'birth control' policies should get together and work something out.

[Batrachian]

They're going to have to do what every other advanced country does and import workers.

[DeaconBenjamin]

I read an economist with AEI state that the unemployment rate in Tokyo is about 25% for under 30s. Might have something to do with the problem.

[In_25_words_or_less]

Japan's birth dearth

So they need a hatch batch.

[Voltage]

Your government needs workers to generate taxes for the state, so get busy breeding or else!

[sd-joe]

After years of attack on motherhood, fatherhood, and the family by the Liberals, guess what we get.

If they would just quite messing with society and trying to social engineer it, to THEIR concepts, everything would be a lot better.

[Lizavetta]

Because of cultural antipathy to working mothers, the limited availability of satisfactory day care, and a general equation of motherhood with unrelieved drudgery, there are few existing incentives for Japanese women to breed.

So the feminists have poisoned the Japanese women as well.

That said, this article doesn't mention (surprise, surprise) heavy taxation as a possible reason why they're not having babies....does anyone know the tax situation in Japan?

[Cicero]

This kind of demographic catastrophe was predictable 20 years ago and more. And the social planners are only just noticing it? A bit late. You can't start turning out teenagers and young adults right away--it takes years.

[green nexus]

Pat Buchanan pointed this out in his book, The Death of the West--Europe and America are facing the same problem as well--we're not replacing ourselves, so Third Worlders are filling the vacuum.

[valkyrieanne]

The article fails to mention a very important factor keeping Japan's birth rate down.

The Japanese still have a belief that there are only 3-4 universities that are "acceptable" to go to. Companies draw heavily from those universities, and jobs are scarce now in Japan, compared to earlier.

One Japanese company began offering US equivalent of $10,000 to each female worker to have a child. Reportedly one woman sniffed, "That won't even pay for a year of juku."

Juku is the private, after-school tutoring that most Japanese upper-elementary and middle school students *must* take, if they are to get into the "right" high school and thus into the "right" university. The kids work 10 or more hours per week *above* their time in school learning how to pass the strict high school entrance exams. Apparently it's fairly expensive.

Apparently studying overseas isn't considered as "acceptable" as going to a prestigious Japanese university. As long as the country is so obsessed with status, people simply won't have children, or will only have one or two at the most (who can afford all that juku?)

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

If so, the nation's economy as well as its social welfare system would collapse

And there is the elephant that no one wants to talk about.

Most retirement systems are based on the ratio of people to retirees in the work force. A lot of this would go away with a privatized retirement plan which would mean that having young people continually entering the system and paying for the retirees would not be necessary.

[banjo joe]

socially-engineered attitudes about the precedence of work over family

Even if I'm an employee, I regard myself as working for myself.

No one on their death-bed wished they'd spent more time at the office

Jobs are a commodity, as the out-sourcing movement is now showing us.

React accordingly.

[narses]

Ping.

[Ben Ficklin]

US Birth Rate Reaches Record Low

[jriemer]

Unlike Western Europe, Japan has not been "replacing" their "missing births" with Islamists. We need to give them credit for that.

[altair]

According to Naoki Atsumi of the Fuji Research Institute, women who take an eight-year break from the workplace to nurture a child lose an average of 60 million yen, including salary and retirement allowances.

That's much better pay than I would have expected. I wonder how old the data is.