Japan leads the world in population collapse

Life Site News ^ | April 19, 2013 | THADDEUS BAKLINSKI

[The Working Man]

Exactly...

And you said it very well too. You have my congratulations.

[Democrat_media]

bump

[Lizavetta]

Thanks. Could have said a lot more but I restrained myself.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

We sailed on the Patrick twice. There were two Patricks; the other was the M.M. Patrick, known as the Micky Mouse Patrick.

All our trips were Seattle-Yokohama or Yokohama-Seattle, with the last trip a slight deviation.

On the General W. A. Mann, we sailed from Yokohama and stopped for a one day visit to Honolulu in 1961. Then it was on to Oakland, CA.

[Windflier]

Amazing that you can recall those ocean voyages and even what ships you sailed on. Perhaps you were older than I was, when I took the same trips.

My only memory is of my mom lifting me up to the rail so I could look out at the ocean. Scared me so bad that I never forgot it!

[Straight Vermonter]

You made a claim and I refuted it because it was simply untrue.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

My first voyage was when I was about 3 years old.
Last trip home, I was 13.

The Japan I remember, with the massive American footprint, is mostly gone.
All the military housing for thousands of dependents, has been returned to Japan and redeveloped.

I remember walking from our house to the San Kien Garden park, passing through the park to a sandstone cliff and climbing down to the seashore of Yokohama bay. For 100 yen ($.25), I could rent a boat and try fishing for crab and i usually got four or five with a trident spear.

I'd join the Japanese kids doing the same thing, roasting the crabs on an open fire on the beach and nibbling on the small crab legs. They didn't speak much English. I spoke rudimentary Nihon. We understood the fishing experience, tho.

Today, the bay has been land filled and supports a massive oil refinery and auto assembly plant.

[SamAdams76]

This is the country where all their girls went crazy over those Tamagotchi games...the ones where you have to take care of a "virtual" pet on some tiny electronic device that you wear as a bracelet. Throughout the day, you are prompted to feed the pet, or turn down the lights for naptime, or discipline the pet, play with the pet, clean up after the pet after it pees on your rug, etc.

I'm not kidding. An entire generation of little Japanese girls would spend their entire day frantically pushing the buttons trying to keep their electronic pets alive and healthy.

I thinking by now they have upgraded these toys to include virtual babies in which they are prompted to change diapers, bottle-feed, etc. It is probably so gratifying to these girls that they no longer see a need to go through the actual experience. Besides, if you neglect your electronic "virtual" baby and kill it, you can always do a factory reset and get your baby back, without the inconvenience of a public trial and jailtime.

[Windflier]

You’ve got some good memories of a Japan that I can scarcely remember. I do have a few vague recalls of those years, but I was very young at the time. I think I was going on four when we moved back stateside.

I was ten when we arrived in Okinawa, and thirteen when we left. Now, those are some of the brightest, best memories of my life. The place was simply paradise for a kid that age in those days.

Like you, I learned to speak enough Japanese to get by in the villages. We military brats enjoyed an incredible amount of freedom in those days, and were pretty much free to explore as much of that island as we could reach on our bikes.

I guess it was a little like growing up in the country in the US. We got up to things that kids today would find astonishing. Man, did we have fun.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

My dad was an old timer, born in 1906. He was a bit too old to step forward in ‘42 when the war started and thousands of young men were enlisting.

He had experience as a pilot in Asia, flying for China National Airline Corp, owned by American Airlines at the time. He made a connection with the AAF in the China-Burma-India theater and became one of about two dozen civilian pilots who flew the Hump.

After the war, he worked for the Army in Japan, first as a mechanical parts inspector at Camp Zama, then as a purchasing agent at the Army's Japan Procurement Agency in Tokyo.

A lodge buddy had talked him into taking early retirement to help design and build a paper mill in Laos and we all took crash courses in French, the second language of SE Asia. A pack a day of Camels nailed him with a heart attack and he really did retire early, back to the US, our Laos adventure stillborn.

Just as well. In the early 60s, things weren't going well for the Lao royal family. Foreigners weren't wanted either...

[Windflier]

Your dad was born the same year as my granddad. He too missed the big one because of his age, but also because he had a young family at the time.

He was a carpenter, and spent the war years working on many of the military construction projects on the west coast. For about four years, the family rarely saw him, as he worked projects from the Aleutian chain, down to San Diego.

When it was all over, he went home to Los Angeles, got his contractors license, and started his construction business. If the Army hadn’t drafted my dad for Korea in the early fifties, I would have grown up in Granddad’s business, and would probably be passing it on to my own kids right about now. As it turned out, none of my grandfather’s sons followed him into the business, and he closed the doors when he retired.

In the meantime, I and my six siblings were growing up as Army brats in a sub-culture very much different than what most American kids experienced at the time. I didn’t transition into the civilian world until I was a teenager. What a culture shock. I don’t know that I ever fully acclimated to it.