[T]he number of people aged 65 and over reached 21%, overtaking Italy for the first time. The ratio of children under 15 is also lower than anywhere else in the world...Japan now has a greater proportion of older people than anywhere else on the planet - almost 27 million of them. More than four million live alone, a greater number than at any time since the census began in 1920. Throughout Japanese society, fewer and fewer people are finding partners. Roughly three out of five women in their late twenties are unmarried, and a third of those in their early thirties. Almost half the men in the same age group have not found a wife. For both men and women in their twenties and thirties, the number who are unmarried has risen by about 5% since the last census five years ago.
This is the end of the Japanese people.
Well, actually, if the Japanese government A) really wanted to do something about this disaster and B) understood the root cause of the problem, they would. The government is in fact taking a few tentative steps:
The government has begun a new project to provide more childcare and to encourage fathers to take paternity leave. Matchmaking services have even been launched by local councils to try to help people to marry.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that these measures aren't going to work.
First of all, matchmaking services. Do leaders think that it's somehow difficult for Japanese people to meet eligible partners? I lived in Japan for 2.5 years, and I can attest to the fact that it's easier to meet people - good people - there than basically anywhere on Earth. And Japanese people do meet people; according to Durex, Japanese people have had as many sex partners, on average, as Americans. Nearly every Japanese person I have ever met has little or no trouble finding a significant other, unlike many of their isolated, spread-out Internet-obsessed American counterparts.
And this is precisely the problem. It's so easy to meet sexual partners in Japan that one partner is not valued as highly as in America. And if that's not easy enough, well, Japan, with its legalized and widely used sex trade, is the biggest market for prostitution in the world. (In fact, my personal theory is that prostitution itself boosts promiscuity, through the law of supply and demand.)
No wonder most young people there aren't interested in being parents. With eligible new girlfriends and boyfriends always just a train seat away, there's little incentive for the average man or woman to settle down. Sex, then, is the opposite of reproduction. No child care program is going to take away that massive incentive to stay single.
There are other factors at work here, to be sure. With most of the country zoned off from human development, Japanese people are forced into tiny, spare domiciles. The high cost of transportation (an effect of government-sanctioned monopolies and high gas taxes) forces all economic activity into the major metropolises; despite the population decline, Tokyo is the world's biggest city and is still growing.
Combine this with the fact that Japanese companies typically keep men (and women) away from their families for most of the time, and you have a culture that prevents children from orienting their lives around their families. Japan's lack of strong religious belief can't be helping the population situation either.
But from countless discussions with Japanese people, I have come to believe that the availability of easy sex is the primary factor contributing to low population growth. Time and again, single 30-year-olds have told me that "Married people don't get to play." (If you happen to know Japanese, what they actually said was "Kekkon suru to asobenai.")
That may sound fun (or it may be a reason why Japanese women are by far the least satisfied with their romantic relationships out of all women in the world). But when a society chooses to "play" instead of focus on having kids, that society is basically cashing out. There is no tomorrow.
So if the Japanese government really wants to save the Japanese people from extinction, they will take measures like curbing prostitution, opening up land for development, encouraging men to focus on fatherhood, and making it easier for religious organizations to operate in the country.
But something tells me those leaders are too busy "playing" to get the message.
0 comments:
Post a Comment