this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2025

354 points (98.9% liked)

World News

45792 readers

3308 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. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating 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 10/19
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

How to spot Misinformation and Propaganda

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

NewsAutoMod@lemmy.world

jordanlund@lemmy.world

Tenthrow@lemmy.world

little_cow@lemmy.world

lemmyAtom@lemmy.world

354

Japan sees record drop in population – DW (www.dw.com)

submitted 2 days ago by schizoidman@lemm.ee to c/world@lemmy.world

109 comments fedilink hide all child comments

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I just want to notice that most people have been told by the economy in recent years that more people are needed to fulfill all jobs because the economists wanted to increase the supply of workers and therefore push the wages down.

Recently, economists have started understanding that this (AI) wave of automation/innovation might indeed be the last one, the one that reduces demand for human labor without creating more new jobs as a side-product. As such, the number of workers needed declines. Since economists would favor lower taxes, they try to limit Universal Basic Income to a minimum, but that implies fewer people to pay for. As such, they are taking a "lower fertility rate is better" stance now. We're gonna see a lot of "news articles telling us that the falling birth rate is a good thing" in the near future. It just takes a significant effort to spread that message in the population.

[–] overload@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I mean, it would be great if the global population was lower, whilst also not creating aging population issues. Automation plus UBI seems a lot better than "everyone kill grandma". Big issue being that those that own the automation don't want to pay forUBI.

[–] ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 144 points 2 days ago (14 children)

I keep saying it all the time

It isn't about the QUANTITY of life

It's about the QUALITY of life

What sense does it make if you raise your population and everyone is miserably poor or on the edge of becoming poor?

It makes more sense if you just concentrate on making life more manageable, comfortable and sensible for the population you already have. Once you have a comfortable stable population of people who no longer worry about their future .... then they will be more likely to have a family.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 53 points 2 days ago (6 children)

What sense does it make if you raise your population and everyone is miserably poor or on the edge of becoming poor?

I mean, misery is extremely relative. One of the paradoxes of Japan, thanks to its extremely conservative immigration policy and hyper-competitive economy, is that they've made a genuinely beautiful country to live in but one in which foreigners can't stay and most natives can't enjoy it. This population of NEETs who failed the cut-throat academic setting lack the resources to live a comfortable middle class existence. Meanwhile, the new guest worker program simply brings foreigners in to crush the wage labor out and dispose of them. Only foreign tourists, wealthy labor aristocrats, and the handful of small business owners who figured out how to survive get to enjoy Japan for what it is.

But, like, it shouldn't be a miserable place to live. The amenities are world class. The country's ecology is well-preserved. The education system rivals international peers. They've got advanced industry, mass transit, modern health care, spectacular recreation, a population large enough to keep the ball rolling indefinitely without going Easter Island on their own turf, and excellent placement adjacent to other post-industrial powers.

All they need to do is reform their abysmal work culture. But the work culture has become a tulpa they're convinced creates the beatific conditions, rather than a cancer that's destroying it.

[–] Maeve@kbin.earth 13 points 2 days ago

+1 for correct understanding of "tulpa". We need to be aware of our ideas and ideals we create and sustain. Not all tulpas are what we envision. They are, otoh, all teaching spirit-guides.

Beautifully articulated!

load more comments (5 replies)

[–] impudentmortal@lemmy.world 30 points 2 days ago (2 children)

On the one hand, yes having a child with a higher quality of life is better than having many children.

However, there's a good Kurzgesagt video about how the severe decline in birthrate can doom a population. Basically, if a population is not at the very least replacing itself, it will run out of young workers to keep the country going and vastly skew the proportion of elderly people to young workers. Small, rural towns will not survive since young people will flock to cities for work.

Though the video is based on Korea, the same concepts apply for Japan as well.

[–] ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 21 points 2 days ago

The logical, healthy approach to natural population growth and maintenance would be to provide social protections and supports for families and young people to grow into a society where they are encouraged and helped to start a family of one or two children in order to supply a healthy steady supply of new people for future generations.

Unfortunately, our world is governed by sociopathic wealthy overlords who demand more from people and want to give less to them. It's not all their fault because the majority of us all sit around and just passively accept it as just a normal part of society. What that will probably mean is that in the future it will be a strange form of population control where children are no longer born but they will be manufactured and bred in order to provide a steady supply of human resources to keep the profit driven capitalist machine running for wealthy overlords.

From the look of how we managed our society in the past century ... we won't solve this problem sensibly, or with any empathy for society as a whole but rather try to deal with it from an economic and financial point of view. The wealthy owning class don't see humanity as a whole that should be supported in any kind of healthy way ... they see humanity as a source of wealth and a group of thinking individuals that can be taken advantage of to extract wealth for owners rather than for the whole of society.

[–] gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (6 children)

"fear of decline"

also, your argument is based on the totally-nonsense assumption that there "has to be a certain number of workers to sustain the elderly" which is bullshit (frankly). it's not about the number of workers; it's about the productive output, and as we all know, that has risen tremendously the last few years. So there should be no shortage of workers regardless of how many workers there are. Everything else is bullshit the news (which btw are owned by billionaires) tell you because they want to sack a significant part of productive output for themselves - well ofc if rich take 90% of output it's not gonna be enough for everyone. but that's the rich's fault and has nothing to do with "there not being enough workers".

load more comments (6 replies)

[–] exasperation@lemm.ee 3 points 1 day ago

What sense does it make if you raise your population and everyone is miserably poor or on the edge of becoming poor?

There's an overall negative correlation between wealth and fertility, so it's not like the rich are having a ton of kids, either. Or even the societies with decent metrics on wealth or income equality, still tend to be low birth rate countries.

It's a difficult problem, with no one solution (because it's not one cause). Some of it is cultural. Some of it is economic. There are a lot of feedback effects and peer effects, too. And each society has its own mix of cultural and economic issues.

And I'm not actually disagreeing with you. I think there's probably something to be said for cheap cost of living allowing for people to be more comfortable having more children (or at a younger age, which also mathematically grows populations faster than having the same number of children at an older age).

[–] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 13 points 2 days ago (7 children)

It makes more sense if you just concentrate on making life more manageable, comfortable and sensible for the population you already have.

And working age people are necessary to make (and keep) life manageable, comfortable and sensible. This isn't a hypothetical; they're suffering the effects already. We'd need to lean a lot more into automation before society can function as an inverse pyramid.

[–] Feyd@programming.dev 18 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (10 children)

Or, we could transition away from people doing made up jobs that don't need to exist to doing things that actually need to get done

load more comments (10 replies)

[–] Maeve@kbin.earth 11 points 2 days ago (5 children)

Hear me out for a wild idea: businesses could offer living wages, benefits, and work-love balance.

load more comments (5 replies)

[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

But this idea that more people leads to lower quality of life… that’s 1980s overpopulation panic talking.

Japan’s quality of life is suffering because they don’t have enough working age people to support their society.

Literally, we are going to have some difficulties in the coming decades because we don’t have enough people.

I’m not saying more people is always better, or that we have no limits. But when there are more old people than young people, that’s a bad situation, plain and simple.

[–] courageousstep@lemm.ee 12 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Nah, tax the billionaires to bring money back to the working class and to fund the nursing homes. There are enough resources to support an elderly population, it’s all just being hoarded by assholes.

load more comments (4 replies)

load more comments (9 replies)

[–] tiredofsametab@fedia.io 41 points 2 days ago

My two cents with a decade in Japan under my belt:

work-life balance needs to be fixed (there are recent laws helping this, but not enough enforcement)
sexism in work (salary gap and gap in leadership is one of the highest in the world)
do more based on merit than seniority in a number of areas
more jobs and good universities need to be moved outside of the big city centers; daycare availability is a HUGE problem for people I know with kids or looking to have them (whereas in the countryside where I live, they have free daycare slots available but far fewer jobs and opportunities). This would involve some investment in infra to make things happen as well
better investment in education and some revamping of the education system; kids are almost never held back here and once they get into uni it's often seen as a free ride to graduation at many schools; this is not the best system for producing the best innovators and Japan needs innovation
better progress toward digitization; we're woefully behind the times even as many are dragged, kicking and screaming, into more things being online. I still have to send faxes and postal mail to accomplish many things relating to government and taxes. This has a number of costs such as taking time off work to accomplish things in person. Banks are also only open 9-3 M-F with some occasionally having weekend hours. Same with all but an area's "main" post office and other things that just eat into that work-life balance problem by requiring use of time off.
better education in and participation in government and civics; very few people vote in Japan and I'd like to see that change as I think more engagement would help the people better determine what is best for their future.

Edit to add that the above excludes anything related to immigration as I don't really know the right answer/balance there; the above are things that could help immediately without as much handwaving about "destroying our cultural values!" that some complain about by suggesting such daring things as married Japanese couples having separate surnames (illegal in Japan; if both are Japanese, they must unify to one name).

Edit 2: just saw this elsewhere talking about some changes coming: https://leglobal.law/countries/japan/looking-ahead-2025-japan/

[–] SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 50 points 2 days ago (1 children)

They could fix this overnight, but that would require making a bunch of old men less comfortable.

[–] njm1314@lemmy.world 14 points 2 days ago (6 children)

The first step is probably not thinking of it as a problem to be fixed.

load more comments (6 replies)

[–] Fingolfinz@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Legalize weed, get more liberal, and allow some immigration and my useless ass would love to live there

[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml -2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Yea no, stay in the US thanks

[–] Fingolfinz@lemmy.world 1 points 22 hours ago

Yes, Prime Minister

[–] 2ugly2live@lemmy.world 33 points 2 days ago

They've done nothing, and it's still not improving!

[–] gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 23 points 2 days ago (1 children)

People aren't just wageslaves. If there are many, it's easy to see people as a "mass product". If there are fewer, i hope that any individual will be seen with higher value.

[–] resipsaloquitur@lemm.ee 9 points 2 days ago

And, you know, more land and water and clean air for them.

[–] pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 26 points 2 days ago (11 children)

They have to make it easier for them to have families, the men have to be taught to support the family more, and the salary man has to disappear. That's my outside, doesn't know that much, opinion.

load more comments (11 replies)

[–] don@lemm.ee 23 points 2 days ago

"We understand that the declining birthrate is continuing because many people who wish to raise children are not able to fulfill their wishes," Hayashi said.

That’s just a single neutrino in a supergiant star of a problem.

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago (2 children)

The US in 10 years.

[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 1 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

The US has immigration

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 1 points 19 hours ago

Not if Trump and Steven Miller have anything to do with it.

[–] Sybilvane@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Not if they destroy education and ban abortions.

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

That's the plan. Will it work? Probably not. But that won't keep us from doing it just like of all the other bad policy.

load more comments