haha - that's actually an awesome autocorrect.

The word I was looking for was: hikikomori

Because when you shrink you eventually become the third world. No nation ever bows out of the top spot gracefully.

Yeah its not that hard - as with all things Japanese, the paperwork and bureaucracy are insane.

I had a business over there, so getting a business Visa was easy, just time + money.

Edit: The Japanese are extremely insular and many older Japanese outside of the big cities are racist.

They accept 0 refugees, but to be honest, Japan would be a tough place both culturally and linguistically for an outsider who wasn't there to assimilate. A 50-year-old Afghan or Sudanese refugee would really struggle.

The more advanced and wealthy a society becomes, the less they reproduce. The japanese don't need to be having 10 kids to work on a farm.

The population of pretty much all Western countries would also be decreasing had it not been for mass immigration.

Have yall seen how hard they work? Yall complaining about the work culture in America, now multiply that by 100 in Japan.

Oh I agree, only its probably worse than you think (based on my experience).

Xenophobia is widespread and everywhere in Japan...however, outside of Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya etc, if you know what your listening for, the older Japanese are racist (again in my experience).

I have had an old lady smile and look at me and say 外国人 (On’yomi) assuming I spoke no Japanese.

they see automation coming a mile away.

the Japanese are probably the most advanced society on Earth.

and also the weirdest. lol

Lots of people in my family's social circle are Japanese, and my wife and children speak it fluently.

Basically, as in many countries, the men are a bit useless as family men. They stay endless hours at work - not actually working all 12 hours, just staring at screens and sht. You know how in the Soviet Union every speech Stalin made set a new world record for applause, because nobody wanted to be seen to be the first guy to stop clapping? Japan's like that with work - nobody wants to be the first guy to clock off. Then after work the guy goes to bars with his workmates and boss. Home is just the place he stumbles home to flop into bed and snore drunkenly at 1am.

There's also a cultural expectation that as soon as a woman's married, she stops doing paid work. Not even when she has children, but the moment she gets married. And most of the country has tiny apartments, so it's not like she can even spend all day cleaning or something, it only takes so long to clean 500 sq ft and the clothes for two adults, as for cooking - well, he's out for dinner every night, remember?

So if the woman gets married she's going to be on her own at home with nothing to do, only seeing her husband on the weekends - unless he wants a promotion, then he's off playing golf then. Then if she has children, she's on her own with them all day, in fact all week.

The women end up with the problems of being married - the commitments and responsibilities - without the benefits - the companionship, etc.

We know a lot of Japanese-Australian couples. In nine cases out of ten, it's a Japanese woman with an Australian man. It's not that Japanese women don't want to marry and have children, they just don't want to marry and have children with Japanese men.

The exceptions among Japanese men - and there are a significant number of them - who actually seek a proper work-life balance and want to spend time with their wife and children are why Japan's birth rate isn't actually zero.

Many men in many countries are useless. But many countries where they're useless, like Afghanistan or ****lia, they have oppressive rules in place for women, so the women have to marry and have children with them. Japan's a liberal democracy so the women say "no thanks."

Women are too educated and work too much. Pretty direct correlation between the two stats at both the individual and societal level

oh she aint home alone boyo. Best believe Chadkashi is comin to over daily while the wagecuck is at work.

Shrink in terms of population I gave the post plague boom in Europe as an example of a shrinking population preceding a boom.

No, the Japanesemarriagerate is dropping, too. If it were just that kids are expensive, then they'd just marry and not have children.

Demographically, it's not that as children got expensive people had less, it's that as they had less children, they started spending more money on and time with them. If you have six children, you don't sit them down with flash cards to learn to read and write, and when they're bad talk to them about their feelings - you send them out to play down by the river, and if any misbehave you smack them across the back of the head. If you have one or two children, then you can spend all this time shuffling them around to activities and after they stab another child engage a child psychologist to pathologise their bad behaviour.

If you have six children, even if one gets knocked up at 15yo and another goes to prison for assault occasioning grievous bodily harm, well there are still 4 left and there's a chance one of them might grow up to make their dad proud in his old age. If you have one child, then they absolutely must be a genius athlete musician who goes to Harvard or Oxford.

Children don't have to be expensive. But anxious ambitious middle class parents of 1-2 children like to spend a lot of money on and time with their children.

The demographic shift happened first, sorry.

Long-term and environmentally it may be a good thing. But a country where a quarter of the population is over 65 is a different country both socially and economically to what we're used to having.

How do we pay everyone's pensions and healthcare? So we go from taxes being 20-25% of GDP to 40-50% like Sweden and Denmark, you comfortable with that? Just how many people want to be aged care workers and look after someone who's incontinent and has dementia? And if we don't want to do it, should we get migrants to do it? If we get migrants in, do we give them citizenship and change our country ethnically, or should we make them second-class citizens, subject to deportation at any time, and have effectively a slave society like Saudi Arabia or Kuwait?

Or maybe keep the more-or-less healthy oldies working? Well, okay - how'd you like to wait till 50 to be promoted manager because there's an 80yo in that job who's been there 30 years?

Again, they may or may not be bad changes. But it'll be a very different world than what we live in now.

asian women dont want asian men

What's the incentive to marry if you're not going to have children?

as societies advance , the marriage rate & birth rates decline. its not unique to Japan.

But Lol at this being the fault of Japanese men. Strong incorrect information ITT.

One of the best posts itt, so many miscers clueless about how average age affects an economy.

Japan gets a lot of attention for it, but to be real Europe and to a smaller extent the US would look very similar if we weren't importing millions of uneducated 3rd world schlubs every year who pump out dozens of kids. Japan will still be Japanese in 100 years, as it has been for the last 1000 years. In 100 years the west will be unrecognizable to any of us today both in culture and demographics.

1. High IQ/education (proven to result in declining birth rates i.e. waiting until one is financially secure before having kids at the risk of infertility, or ability to overcome urge to rawdog out of marriage)
2. Office-celing
3. Development of ability to overcome one's most primal instincts and arguably find 'better' fulfilment through other endeavours in life.
4. A lot of their alpha's who are likely to have test levels high enough to overcome one's suppression of going rawdog died in WW2.

I think the Government imposed tax disincentives against families with more than 1 dependent back in the day as a population control measure but they didn't keep an eye on it and now they have the opposite problem. I could be wrong.

"Foreign Country Person" and "foreign person" are the most racist things you can be called in Japan? I don't know how people can stand to be in such a racist place

Plummeting birth rate by whose standards?



Japan is the size of California and has over 120 million people. It’s one of the most overcrowded country in the world, same with South Korea.

Many countries in Europe have just as low birth rate as Japan, but no one is talking about that. Reason is the modern lifestyle is so demanding that people don't have the time or energy for relationships anymore.

Im a god in Japan.

One day when you are not a forever alone *******, you will understand.

waifus

nah for real...it's the cost of living and supporting a family

same chit is happening everywhere in the developed world

repped

Well, I wouldn't say it to someone as it's pretty cruel, but it's the name he's chosen for the forum, so...

Meh, I'm not even mad. I'm a 24yo kissless hugless virgin who hasn't spoke to any unmarried girl my age since last October, so it's tough to get upset about the truth.

That's kind of the thing though - I can't think of any hetero people I know where kids aren't in the picture. I've spoken to a couple students who've recently got married (marrying young is a big thing here) and they're like "we're gonna have kids in 3-5 years when things are more stable!" Between having new kids, planning to have kids, taking in step kids, whatever... I can't think of a marriage I know with no kids. It seems like a fait accompli.

It's not even a problem, so the birthrate goes down, then old people die, then people start having kids again. There is no problem and society will equalize