You know, many eastern countries apparently intuitively think in cycles. The west tends to think linearly: "We're trending upwards, argh argh overpopulation, famine, death. We're trending downwards, argh argh population collapse, famine, death".
Same with the perception of time. My country sees time as a line. I once had an interesting training where the instructor pointed this out. She went on to say that seeing time as a circle or a point is also an option. It wasn't until I hit the second half of life that I got a glimpse of what that looks like, personally.
Perhaps subconsciously, Japan envisions that the birth rate will go up again sometime in the future and they will have preserved their identity and culture from which to build again.
I do find it funny that some folks treat this is like the complete end of Japan (or whatever) nation, like you said a straight line down. But eventually it will bottom out and potentially rebound a bit. It find on the way up or at the top, and it will be fine at the bottom once the trends return but the issue really is the pain of the phase shift.
Neither immigrants nor robots will prevent them from becoming essentially extinct as an ethno-national group if they don't do something serious to stimulate the fertility rate. They need to find the root of why Japanese aren't having kids and resolve it.
I'd say it's due primarily to the collision of their values with Western values, particularly concerning family and workplace roles. The core issue is actually being faced by all developed nations, but it hits Japan really hard due to their immigration stance as well as lack of natural resources (they need to excel in providing globally scoped services).
I suspect part of the problem is that people are worked hard and don't really have a vision of the future that they are actively building towards as a nation. Hard work alone doesn't dissuade people from having kids but not having a positive or even constant future target combined with that can cause folks to just give up on that kind of aspiration.
This is an issue that develops over decades and places like Japan, South Korea and potentially China, this is already baked in to the point that it is unstoppable. The same is coming to many other nations over the coming decades.
Japan's population is dropping like a stone. Since I first arrived here some years ago the population has gone down by several millions.
Countries which have more immigration (like my native one, also with a low birth rate) manage to keep up the population size, and, equally important, manage to keep the median age somewhat lower (the median age in Japan is now above 50).
If immigration is not a solution, then I assume you mean that reversing the birth rate problem is the way to go. Can't disagree there, but how do you propose to do that? No country with a birth rate below 2 seems to have been able to come up with a way to "fix" that.
The main problem is that solutions would be very expensive and, unfortunately, politicians don't get (re-)elected to solve problems that manifest over the span of decades.
I don't think that's correct. Saying that "solutions would be very expensive" implies that there are actual solutions in existence. I've seen a lot of suggestions, and many have been implemented, some do slow down the dropping birthrate problem (countries with good maternity leave systems and regulated working hours are doing way better than those without), but nowhere have I seen any true fix presented, with or without a label "will work, but will be too expensive".
I argue nobody dared to try. Would be a significant undertaking for the whole society. It's manifesting way to slow so nobody sees the acute urgency, so politicians tend to think about other topic most of the time.
Also pretty hard with a society full of people that don't want to have children that they must pay a lot of money to people that have children. All that while also paying a lot of money to people that are too old to work.
What I'm asking is "..dared to try what?". What, excactly, would you offer? As I mentioned in another comment, those families in my own country which a) do not have any economical worries, and b) have great family leave support from work, i.e. no career problems whatsoever, and c) even more that I don't list here, they DO NOT WANT more than two children anyway. Because it feels fine with two. And then there's a problem, because that's not enough - there are a lot of singles out there, and most of them don't produce any children. You need more than two children per family, on average, to keep up the birthrate vs the death rate.
So, what is the solution that nobody has dared to try?
From my tangential experience (brother and wife live in Tokyo), there are a ton of programs that are extremely desirable from the US birthrate/childcare perspective already.
Base level of 8 weeks Maternity leave , with 6 weeks ahead of birth as well. And government pays a lump sum to help cover hospital costs per birth.
The community support and available activities.
Seesh the only things that seem negative are the Japanese type of xenophobic culture (my family is white, so their kids are mixed), and the small living space which leaves little room for privacy in like any point of their day.
From all I've read or heard about birth rate rise the measures that sociologists see as the most effective are: provide cheap housing and pay much more to families (i.e. mostly to women) with children to compensate for their loss of potential career. The latter has a twist that the payment should start (or significantly increase) with the birth of the second child (and continue to rise with the third etc). Paying for the first child does next to nothing to the birth rate. Some countries already do that, but the amount of money poured into this should increase by order(s) of magnitude to achieve the replacement level.
Or we can go full medieval - completely deprive women of education possibilities and financial independence, like Taliban does.
> the amount of money poured into this should increase by order(s) of magnitude to achieve the replacement level.
Exactly. And I found it being obvious after having thought about it, even while not having kids and I most likely will never have any.
Just from observing and talking to people with 0-2 kids (nobody I know has more...).
I know a couple with good income, living in Munich, which is one of the most costly cities in Germany, one Child. Avoidable pain points (finding daycare, you better start right after the baby was born, because they have multi-year waiting lists) and they feel the financial hit pretty hard.
America has, it reversed below subsistence rate birth rates. More importantly despite some years of negative population growth the net long term trend is slow population growth.
So despite both issues the long term trend is slow net population growth. Thus significantly below subsistence birth rates where flipped from a massive issue to a non issue.
US fertility rates first fell below replacement in 1972, falling to 1.8 by 1984, then rising back above replacement by 2007, then falling to 1.79 today. Despite being below replacement for 53 of the last 54 years, overall US population has never declined.
> Also weird to admit that no country has reversed its birth rate problem, but still insist upon massive immigration being the solution.
Because those "floodgates" for the most part have never existed and are just fear inducing rhetoric. Immigration has always been insignificant in terms of the whole population and therefore can not solve systemic problems alone.
How do you define insignificant? From 1950 to 2000 (50 years), the foreign born percentage of the UK doubled from 4% to 8%. In the 20 years after that, the percentage doubled again to 16%. In the five years since 2020, the percentage has increased another 4 points to ~20%.
Not only is 13 million people not "insignificant" in my book, but clearly the trend is accelerating.
Fair enough, that's not insignificant. As a German, I feel sorry that you feel the UK got flooded with my people, as they are one of the biggest part of the immigrants.
My understanding is, the "original flood" from India, just like the turkey workforce in Germany, was desperately needed back then, "flooding a dry land" so to say.
Just as in Germany, a significant portion of doctors (30%) in the UK were born in another country. So it seems they (just as Germany) still pretty much rely on foreign workforce which is also why the numbers didn't go down after brexit even with the foreigner unfriendly political climate that caused it.
Look back a few hundred years and you'll find that the country you grew up in, in Europe, was constantly in that situation. People moved a lot back then too. And the countries are today.. the countries. It'll be fine.
The last migration of equivalent magnitude was the Anglo-Saxons 1500 years ago... Most people did not move around much at all. An average person would be born and die in the same village, or the same region. A handful of people travelled a lot, generally merchants, sailors, and such, but they were a pretty tiny percentage of the population compared to the people engaged in subsistence agriculture.
The US opened the border significantly during the Biden administration and it caused plenty of issues worth worrying about. I think that is a good example of opening the floodgates. But if you mean only in terms of affecting the population numbers then prob irrelevant.
> There is no “zero” immigration policy, this is a strawman.
Japan and Korea(can’t remember their names at the time but pretty sure it wasn’t those two) were famously hermit kingdoms until the US showed up and threatened war if they wouldn’t trade.
The first Medal of Honors awarded for combat internationally were given to US soldiers who ended up fighting the Koreans shortly after the civil war because of their desire to keep foreigners out[1]
Fertility rate of 0.80.. and I thought Japan, Italy, and my own country had problems. Note however that https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/south-korea-p... says 0.76, and last year was 0.75, so there's barely any change there. Catastrophically low birth rate, and maybe it's not so hard to figure out why.
In the united states the birthrate problem is largely climate change panic (which is not a reason to not have kids because other populations / immigrants start accelerating their birth rates), and then because of heavy migration and other market factors, home prices have skyrocketed. Many couples don't want to have kids until they at least buy their "starter house".
I'm not very familiar with Japan's problems, but I think it's different. I think it has more to do with some kind of never growing up adults.
I guess we're ready to blame anything but work hours, no one has time to take care of kids anymore. The correlation between industrialization and falling birth rates has long been established, but it's just shrugged off as a "that's just the way it is" rather than taking a serious look at the 8-hour work day.
> weird to admit that no country has reversed its birth rate problem, but still insist upon massive immigration being the solution.
How exactly is this weird when you don’t want your population to decline? Like it or not, every modern economic system whether it’s capitalism or socialism relies on population growth.
Children cost hundred's of thousands of dollars to raise, and that doesn't even count the opportunity cost of your own career progression as you have to spend a year of sleepless nights and possibly have one or both parents reduce their work hours to care for the child.
The Japanese government already struggles to pay out pensions with its aging population, healthcare and pension costs are both rising, where do you propose the money for this comes from?
Should the government increase its already high tax rate from up-to-50% to up-to-90% and take money from the childless to give to parents?
Should the government replace your salary if you quit your job to raise a kid (since after-all that is a cost of the endeavor)?
If you're just talking about "giving birth", I assure you the cost to give birth is already close to free, the government already covers that, and various cities have local parent stipends which make it "profitable" in a sense.
But the real cost of giving birth is not the giving birth, it's the millions of yen you then need to spend over the next 18 years to raise and educate the child, not to mention the cost of possibly dying during childbirth.
> Should the government increase its already high tax rate from up-to-50% to up-to-90% and take money from the childless to give to parents?
Yes
> Should the government replace your salary if you quit your job to raise a kid (since after-all that is a cost of the endeavor)?
Yes
> If you're just talking about "giving birth", I assure you the cost to give birth is already close to free, the government already covers that, and various cities have local parent stipends which make it "profitable" in a sense.
Yes and no. There are a zillion different support programs where you have to fill out a 4 page form in triplicate and submit to city hall to get $80 3 months later. Childbirth is induced regardless of medical necessity because there's one programme that covers medical costs up to the scheduled due date and another programme that covers medical costs after birth, but if you need medical care after your due date with the baby still unborn then you fall through the cracks. The country badly needs to replace its patchwork subsidy program with simply including childbirth under normal medical insurance.
It is not as simple as that. In my country giving birth is free. And you get economic support for every child. For most people it's still an economic burden to some extent, but for the majority it's not something which blocks them from having children. It's more that most families I know are content with having two children. It feels fine to them. But that's the families that do have children. 25% of men in my country never have children. It's not enough. A lot of families need to produce 3 children, and better if there are some with four.. and most people simply don't want that. And that's for the most part not a question of economy.
>But a strict zero-immigration policy collides with one terrifying reality: No country in history has successfully reversed a falling fertility rate, and Japan shows zero signs of breaking that trend.
Wrong! Korea has successfully reversed theirs starting this year due to some extreme policies benefiting families with children
The worldometer statistics site doesn't fully agree with that, the Guardian reports that the rate went from 0.75 to 0.80, while worldometer states that the 2026 rate will probably end up at 0.76. At best this has kind of stopped dropping, but it is any case catastrophically low (and way worse than Japan)
I am really shocked at the tone of so many of the comments here. Did HN become a breeding ground for xenophobia at some point? Has it always been that and is it just way more mask off now?
I’ve noticed this too. I think it started around the time of the first round of big tech layoffs in the US, and when the US ratcheted up the price for H1B(?) visas.
Seems like economic uncertainty or fear of it breeds xenophobia. Who knew
I am not at all concerned about this problem. At this point, society mostly need people as consumers, so quality is not as important as it used to be (in democratic countries it's a bit more complicated because people vote - but this is solvable too).
Because there are no resource or technology constraints that prevent solving it, just regulatory concerns, and because regulatory concerns are easy to solve in unfree countries almost by definition, and because unfree countries face this problem to a larger degree than free ones so will be also forced to act sooner, and because once they figure the solution it will become imperative for all other countries to do the same or quickly cease to exist so regulatory concerns will be quickly overcome - there is really no way this won't be satisfactorily solved.
> The industry is shifting from rigid industrial arms to general-purpose robots powered by advanced AI
It is not, if by "general-purpose robots" we mean humanoid robots, and by "AI" we mean LLMs. Factories will continue to be designed around robots that are designed for specific purposes and controlled by normal, predictable software.
They’ll find it easy to keep their homogenous culture and shared traditional values.
Why would the solution to “our people aren’t having enough babies” be “we should import different people to have their babies here”?
Why does ever single bleeding heart liberal globalist try and ignore the deep psychological truths about human tribalism? It’s not even a bad thing, but even if it was, it’s a fact.
> Why does ever single bleeding heart liberal globalist try and ignore the deep psychological truths about human tribalism?
I'll bite.
In the US, for one, every single person has an ancestor that thanked their lucky stars the locals didn't think the way that you are recommending we think today. Or an ancestor that suffered because the locals did think that way.
We honor that heritage by paying it forward, lest we be lumped among the trash of history that punished the Irish, the Chinese, and the Jews for the cardinal sin of living down the street.
The idea that Japan is a uniquely "homogeneous culture" is honestly a modern construct anyway. Japanese culture and language has been enormously influenced by colonial and migrant presence in the country, from Chinese to Dutch to British to American, and a zillion others.
Just look at the language! I don't have the exact figure in front of me, but I remember when taking Japanese language courses that something like 30% of the lexicon is loanwords from other languages (edit: I looked it up and it's apparently closer to 50%) Way higher than most other widely spoken languages on the planet. Japanese culture is legitimately _amazing_ in its capacity to absorb and domesticate outside influence, and it's unfortunate that people both in the country and abroad are so short-sighted to not see that.
The Meiji and Showa era militarism benefited a lot by promoting this myth. They weren't alone, mind you. Lots of folks across the EU and the US are still falling for the same nationalist stories that their governments cooked up in the early 1900s to drive them all to war.
The country _does_ have a really notable cohesion and shared identity, but the problem is in attributing that to some kind of unique isolationism rather than their long history of pluralism.
> the deep psychological truths about human tribalism
… that the races should keep to themselves? Yea, I’m going to have to disagree on this one.
This was pretty handily disproven by the New World. Mixing, sharing, cohabiting… this creates culture and makes us stronger. Isolation, protectionism, and fear makes us weak.
>They’ll find it easy to keep their homogenous culture and shared traditional values.
That idea is a fallacy. It has never been true. All of Europe was always a melting pot for people from everywhere. Over the centuries people kept moving, immigrating and emigrating. England.. Britons, Celts, Anglo-Saxxon, Norse, Normans (which were themselves originally immigrants). And my own country? Surnames from everywhere. 40% of my language's vocabulary came from immigrants. Is that a problem? I most certainly can't see any.
The idea about 'homogenous culture and shared traditional values' is as true as looking at a flower for five minutes and then claiming that "nah, it doesn't grow, it's frozen".
It is not necessarily true, I think it is opposite. More poorer they get, less attractive that place becomes. Especially since Japan is not rich with natural resources, there is nothing really to steal there
> Why would the solution to “our people aren’t having enough babies” be “we should import different people to have their babies here”?
I'm not "... liberal", however there are two reasons. For one it has turned or to be very hard to convince people to "just have more babies". Second reason is that immigration workforce is available immediately, while an increase in birth rate will only help 20 years later.
Even if you manage to reverse the trajectory of the birth rate, how long would it take to approach 2.0? How long until you have healthy demographics? 50, 70 years, maybe, that's just too long.
> truths about human tribalism?
Truth is that human are complicated and have survived for so long not because of their thumbs or their language, but because of their adaptability.
> They’ll find it easy to keep their homogenous culture and shared traditional values.
Talking about homogenous culture I hope you don't live in the US, because that guys for sure never had one. US is way too big for that which is also why so many laws are still defined by the states.
I think the point is we can't have our cake and eat it too.
They need _someone_ (or something, if they can manage) to sustain the way of life they hold so dear.
And it's not something a country can just decide on a whim like "oop looks like we really need more people tomorrow folks". What are they going to do? Import millions of people 18 years from now? Or plan ahead to make sure millions of babies are born now to grow into the people they like 18 years from now?
> They need _someone_ (or something, if they can manage) to sustain the way of life they hold so dear.
They don't though? Pensions will be cut. Retirements will be pushed back. Grandparents with dementia will be kept mostly-alive in their children's homes rather than getting proper care. There will be pain and suffering. But I don't see any of that pushing the country to breaking point.
> And it's not something a country can just decide on a whim like "oop looks like we really need more people tomorrow folks". What are they going to do? Import millions of people 18 years from now? Or plan ahead to make sure millions of babies are born now to grow into the people they like 18 years from now?
As hard as fixing a low population is, it's easier than fixing a society where trust has broken down, which is what the western countries that went hard on immigration are already starting to face.
Also different cultures can withstand different level of hardships. With population decline what kind of quality of life drop we are talking about? Even if people get 2 times poorer, it is still way above than whatever people had in old times. That level can easily drop way further and people can adapt.
I think it is even better to not have immigration as a solution, because it accelerates this whole problem and forces the society to search for other ways to solve the issue.
Yeah not sure why you’re being downvoted. Work hard on making elderly care as easy as possible, automate automatable things. Importing people is just kicking the ageing population can down the road; these immigrant will grow old one day, and then what, import even more people?
For one generation, maybe. Once they've assimilated even a little (which is usually what you want, right?) they revert to the same birthrate as everyone else.
They need _someone_ (or something, if they can manage) to sustain the way of life they hold so dear.
That's what the robots are (or, rather, will be) for.
More seriously, I'm all for liberalizing immigration policy, myself, in almost every respect. But unfortunately the conservative reaction is costing us everything. It's too easy for them to use "Open borders, ooga booga!" to scare the rubes. When conservatives have nothing more to offer the future and no defense for their past, they can always fall back on that. It works.
Every country will end up with its own army of MAGA zombies if it pursues this course, and Japan is no exception.
The quantity of people isn't relevant, it's the quantity of people by age.
Older people, en masse, become a burden. If you add another 43 million people aged over 60 on top of your 43 million from 1900, suddenly that 86 million is less productive than the original 43 million.
Currently Japan has ~41 million people aged 0-40, ~41 million aged 40-60, and ~41 million aged 60+
Around 1900 the median age of the Japanese population was somewhere in the twenties, in other words, they had a healthy and able work force relative to the population size. Today the median age is above 50, and there aren't many who can work the fields. In fact around here I see very old people doing that, and a lot of them can hardly walk normally, they're permanently bent.
What percentage of the Japanese workforce is working in the fields? Most industrial economies are in the 1-2% range for agriculture. And someone in their 50s can easily ride a tractor. Manual labor in the fields is not a productive use of labor in a first-world economy - the fact that it's still happening demonstrates slack in the system that can be absorbed.
Rice fields, around here at least. That's always been very labor intensive. They do use tractors to do some of it, but around the periphery of every field it's still done manually. Rice fields are very different from wheat production.
In my country strawberries are picked manually. There's yet no mechanical solution which can do what humans can, with respect to quality and more. And that's already a problem, without seasonal immigration there will be no strawberries on the market, simple as that. There are many other kind of work which still requires a young healthy work force.
That's the whole point of price signals though: luxury foods like strawberries will get more expensive if young, physically fit workers are in higher demand. People will shift their consumption accordingly. Maybe the strawberry pickers will end up working in nursing homes, and that's fine.
Rice in Japan apparently also benefits from extensive farm subsidies and protectionism. So it's ironic to point to those jobs as a risk for an aging workforce, when they are fundamentally just government make-work jobs. Sure food security is a concern, but it can be achieved in a much more efficient way.
As an European living in Japan... no, Japan will not be fine. At least we Europeans are aware of our problems and try to look for solutions (whether we actually solve anything is another topic), the Japanese are masters of solving problems by ignoring them.
Their culture has a lot of good things, but also bad things that are leading then to the abyss, but if you watch Japanese media they never discuss any sensitive topic and always try to paint themselves as the best country in the world. Maybe they should start doing some self-criticism...
This is an insane way to frame immigration reform. It isn’t “ceding” anything, it just means being OK that not every single person you know is the same race. Having some cultural exchange, growing as a person, learning about the world beyond your borders… these are virtues.
No, not really. Broadly, immigration has no effect on crime-rates. In case-study after case-study, it’s shown immigration has little to no impact on crime-rates. This was even disproven after the height of the Syrian refuge crisis! But media likes sensationalist reporting, so public perception doesn’t match the statistics.
> cultural demise.
Meaningless, also created by the media. If you listen to the media, Britain is under the fierce grip of Sharia law, enforced by… the 6% of the population that is Muslim. Yes, yes, how scary. I guess English culture was pretty weak, to meet its demise from such a meager blip.
>Broadly, immigration has no effect on crime-rates.
This just isn't true. There are a lot of studies that purport this. There are also a lot of studies that purport the opposite. A quick look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime shows a bit of the field here.
The details get really important when talking about this. Details like:
- immigrant crime rates are often compared to non-immigrant rates, as if the native-born are a single bloc, rather than distinct segments
- "immigrants" treated as a single bloc
- immigrant crime getting controlled for by age, gender, income, and education --- which is cold comfort if the bulk of your immigration is poor uneducated young men
- first-gen immigrants, if immigrating to work, often have lower crime rates. This effect disappears with second-generation. But when they do crime, it is counted as native crime, rather than immigrant crime. That...doesn't quite cleave reality at the joints.
- labor law violations, tax evasion, etc., often not counted as "crime."
The thing is very simple: I am really not afraid of police in Germany. Worst thing that can happen is spending a night in jail. In other countries the police can shoot you or seriously beat you up. So basically there is no police. And the jail… well it’s all inclusive hotel compared to other countries. Deportation is anyway very unlikely. So what should stop me from doing bad things?
For one, this article doesn’t claim that immigration increases overall crime.
Secondly, the article hints at a sampling bias we have run into before, during the Syrian refugee crisis: Immigrants are not more likely compared to their peers.
If you compare a block that is predominately young men to the general population, they commit more crime – because they are young men, not because they are immigrants.
A proper statistical comparison looks at the sub-demographics, comparing immigrant and native folk to their peers in age and sex.
Compare 18-year old men from Algeria to native 18 year-old men, and they aren’t any more likely to commit crime. But between 18-year old men and the general population? Well, duh, because one group has more young men in it.
Which is to say: No, immigrants aren’t more likely to commit crimes.
First generation immigrants to the EU do not have higher rates of crime vs. natively born citizens. (Go ahead, google it). This is a far right talking point, but it simply not true.*
When I studied in Germany, my house was broken into by a Bosnian migrant neighbour. The entire thing was captured on CCTV and reported to the Polizei, and they did exactly nothing, claiming the CCTV footage “does not prove anything”. All my money in my wallet was taken.
Yeah since then I don’t trust the crime figures from Germany.
I am not going to debate on manipulation of one cherry picked number.
If your point is that crime hasn't risen up since EU started to receive "refugees" in droves, you are either not living in EU or prefer to ignore wider evidence dismissing it as "far-right talking point" (whatever that is)
>“The results are consistent with international research, according to which migration and refugee inflows have no systematic influence on crime in the host country.”
> Foreigners are overrepresented in the crime statistics compared to their share of the population. This is due to factors independent of origin
It takes an incredible amount of chutzpah to admit that migrants are commiting more crime per-capita, and then build a statistical model to try to claim that actually more migrants doesn't cause an increase in crime.
I live in Germany and crime has been falling significantly since the 1990s with clearance rates for crimes like murder at 93%+
It’s by far one of the safest countries in the world.
I think the way you phrase you reply makes it pretty clear where you stand emotionally and politically, so I won’t pretend that facts will change your mind, but alas.
So tired of hearing the same lies repeated over and over again in media.
It's possible, but at this point we don't know yet how each will play out long term. EU chose to destroy itself fast, while Japan chose slow economic demise.
I am not sure tech approach is a right way to go if we project it at wider scale on a society or a country.
Society moves at way slower pace, and wrong turns may takes decades to rectify. Needless to say wrong turns may have horrible ramifications lasting decades as well.
If you'd ask me, I would certainly be against tech approach here. Lets leave it where it does play well.
Same with the perception of time. My country sees time as a line. I once had an interesting training where the instructor pointed this out. She went on to say that seeing time as a circle or a point is also an option. It wasn't until I hit the second half of life that I got a glimpse of what that looks like, personally.
Perhaps subconsciously, Japan envisions that the birth rate will go up again sometime in the future and they will have preserved their identity and culture from which to build again.
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