Japan’s population is shrinking – fast. Plummeting birthrates are a larger problem faced by countries around the world, including Italy, Germany and Greece.  But Japan is at the forefront. Yu Korekawa, a senior researcher with the Population Dynamics Research department at Japan’s National Institute of Population and Social Security Research showed me a report on the future of the country’s population. It’s 42 pages long, but bottom line the numbers don’t look good -- Japan’s population is expected to shrink in half by the year 2082.  In 2010, the country's population was 128 million. By 2082, that number is projected to drop to 64 million.

While we were talking, Korekawa continually opened and closed his eyes. He looked tired. “I have two babies. Two daughters – one is seven years old and the other one is just eight months,” he said. “My wife is working and it’s kind of very difficult,” he said.

According to Korekawa, Japan’s population decline is mainly due to economics. Real estate is expensive. And if you work long hours you have to pay for childcare. It’s simple math. People just can’t afford to have enough kids to keep up with population losses. The magic number is 2.1. That’s how many kids Japanese families need to have, on average, to keep up with population losses. Instead, they’re only having 1.4 kids. 

China is booming because of the one child policy. They were literally starving a generation or two back. The only reason they have an "ageing population" crisis is because they went from starving to death to outliving their ancestors by decades in a very short period. Which 'problem' would you rather have?

Tell me Svengali, if your country can not produce enough food to feed yourself, and you try to double the population, what do you think is going to happen?

I spent 16 years in Japan and am not so sure its shrinking birthrate can be attributed to economic reasons or any single reason at all. As women become more educated they have fewer children. This has been noted all over the world. Japan is on the cusp of a massive population decline exacerbated by lack of immigration. Other countries aren't far behind.

fertility is declining in industrialised societies Thats the elephant in the room.

Svengali wrote on May 6^th, 2016 at 12:01am:


Would you prefer we continue ramping up the global population exponentially so as to maintain recent patterns of age distribution within society?