149
Births in Japan fall in 2025 to 706,000, record low for 10th straight year
(english.kyodonews.net)
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2026
149 points (97.5% liked)
World News
54583 readers
2875 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF OCTOBER 19 2025
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm a bit conflicted on the population and birthrate issue. On one hand you have those who worry that an ever increasing population will lead to resource scarcity, economic stress and degrading climate resilience. Then you have those, especially on the right, that insist we need to have more babies. Usually, that "we" is white people. For example, that weird Collins couple who are having kids not of love but out of ~~eugenic~~ patriotic obligation.
So, my question is this: when discussing population crisis, be it overpopulation or under-population, what is legitimate concern and what's just ring-wing fear mongering?
The legitimate concern is every economy runs on the assumption of infinite growth. In essence every nations economy is one big pyramid scheme that can go on and on as long their women have at least 2.1 births on their downline.
We need a system that can run well on degrowth, there's no good reason why one couldn't work but there are trillions of reasons why people will fight tooth and nail to prop up the current one. People's choices and the environment be damned.
The optimist in me hopes that AI just makes up for the loss in human labor from population loss and everything just keeps functioning.
The issue happening in Japan is that there won't be enough young people to support all the old people who can't work
There are advantages and issues with both high and low population, but the most pressing issue is that when population decreases, it puts a strain on working people because there's a higher share of the population that is retired.
The core issue is population distribution. Most governments are designed to run with a certain proportion of people in each age bracket. Japan and much of Europe is headed towards being essentially old age communities. Governments are not effective at saving money to provide for the needs of a majority elderly population elderly. They typically make use of resources coming from the productively employed segments of society. With an elderly skewed population, there would need to be major institutional overhauls to meet the needs of people.