“Japan has a real aging problem, and it seems no one is particularly interested in having kids. Their society may be more stable, but societies still die if they don’t have younger generations to pass it onto.”
Agree, that is a big problem, and most of the West isn’t much better off, when you back out immigration (and the kids of immigrants). It sucks to see, and there are ways to deal with it, but they’re big steps* and no country, so far, has done enough in that direction.
Other than Eastern Europe, the West has chosen to dilute their societies and cultures through immigration, while Japan refuses to do that, and prefers taking the hit on population. That’s why they’ll still be around in 50 years, assuming that they can hold off China (albeit with less people), whereas the West, in its present form, will be gone.
*basically paying women to have babies and raise them, rather than work, as we’ve shown that you can’t have both together and even maintain replacement population.
If the U.S. were to adopt such a policy, it would be labeled “nativist” and “racist” in a nanosecond, yet it’s what we need to survive. Due to moral panic about the environment, too many Europeans have given up having children and even financial payouts haven’t worked to boost their population by much. The only countries that do see a birthrate rise are those Central and Eastern European countries that don’t denigrate religion.