This article calls it a "quiet emergency" but even as a foreigner living in Japan there are alarm bells everywhere. And the government buying 150 F35's is just a slap in the face when there's a massive chunk of the population that is, very quickly, going to need extra care.
I looked into becoming a care aid myself as I'm tired of office culture in Japan and have some experience in that field. I was shocked to see that they start at less than 10USD, and working your way up takes years, decades even.
Continuing to kick this can down the road is going to be an absolute disaster.
Your immediate neighbor is going on an imperialist streak right now, and Xi says he wants the fireworks to start in his lifetime. I don't know if F35s are the right answer for Japan, but Xi isn't that young. Get ready however you can.
The ministry of propaganda in China runs an English language international news channel available as an IPTV stream (https://tvexplorer.live/)
If you want a better understanding of which world events China is not happy about, tuning in there to see what they cover unfavorably has been useful for me.
They seem to be very unhappy about Japan building up its war fighting capacity.
> They seem to be very unhappy about Japan building up its war fighting capacity.
Maybe because of Japan's history of horrific war crimes and occupation in China? You know, the actual imperial conquest for which their constitution prohibits them from having a standing air force?
Japan is never going to voluntarily attack China. Even if there was a desire to, they know they could not win. Any military build up by the former is due to fear of the latter.
Japan probably won't not attack China (I don't see why they would, not proactively at least), that's not what was being asserted. Japan however may defend Taiwan or allies/neighbors in the south china sea should things go hot there elsewise. And Japan have stated at least some interest in doing so which means that if China wants Taiwan, they might have to contend with japan.
These sort of things can work as a deterrent as much as power projection, and they don't have to get into direct violent/physical conflict for there to be diplomatic tension/worsening of relations as a result. I'm not saying this is most effective use of Japan's resources or focus or that China is for sure going to do anything or making any other such claims, just explaining the potential rational for why China would be non-plussed at Japan over F35 purchases even if they don't feel Japan is gunning for them.
Of course, if china has no actual wartime intentions in Japans sphere of influence, then yeah, they probably give much less of a shit. So depends on what their intentions really are as to how they feel about it. The fact that they're publicly broadcasting displeasure is probably not a sign that they're cool with it though.
Any protest from China is just painting themselves as being in a defensive position, whilst they make claims over the oceans and territories that the international community disagrees with. Very much not defensive acts.
It's wild that people say this. Japan attacking China (and later the Western colonies, and later the US) knowing that it could not win was one of the most important events in the 20th century. There isn't a country as infamous as Japan for starting wars it cannot win.
Also that attack happened on Sept 18, this very day, in 1931.
Not so wild when you realise that it's not the 1930s, and Japan isn't being led by an imperialist & expansionist regime. I'm not denying any past aggression from Japan, my grandparents fought them, but the situation is quite different now.
All of the people responsible for that are dead now. Every single one. Maybe there are still 100k people alive that were ~5yo at the time, but I don't think we can hold them culpable.
The strange and ironic thing here is that the subject and object of this statement can be either country.
My wife is from Manchuria and my father is from Singapore. As much as my wife and I like the Japan of today, Japan appeared less favourably in our family history.
>They seem to be very unhappy about Japan building up its war fighting capacity.
Could be a strategy going on here.
Before they invaded Ukraine, Russia criticized Ukrainian military buildup as "destabalising". Probably with full knowledge of their own plans to invade.
If the Japanese are looking for technology to protect themselves against a heavily armed imperial force they should be mass producing Shaheds instead of paying tributes to the US MIC.
Shahed drone's are not serious weapons of war. Japan could easily produce millions of them if needed. The drones are good for antagonizing and terrorising a civilian population. A few F35s and bomber squads could reliably deplete and destroy the entire Iranian drone stock and manufacturing capacity if there was the desire and higher tolerance for civilian casualties.
In other words if Japan were in a position where they were willing to use drones to indiscriminately attack soft targets an F-35 would be about a trillion times more effective.
> The drones are good for antagonizing and terrorising [sic] a civilian population. A few F35s and bomber squads could reliably deplete and destroy the entire Iranian drone stock and manufacturing capacity if there was the desire and higher tolerance for civilian casualties.
Absolutely incorrect.
- The purpose of these drones is to establish deterrence.
- US is not capable of reaching every inch of Iranian airspace with F-35s unless it is willing to accept a significant casualty rate among pilots.
- Even if they could, the US has not been able to decimate Iran's drone stockpile even in the areas it can ~safely reach.
Quite possibly. But shaheds aren't the answer either. After Fukushima, the plutonium 240 fuel for the breeders they don't want to run anymore has been piling up. Not as good as 239, but that is what they should be looking at.
Because of stealth jets, the US is capable of destroying every single power plant in the country, with all the horrible human cost you would expect. Exactly like Putin has been trying to do in Ukraine. Except, they could actually do it.
Trump and Hegseth may be bumbling idiots but so far they have been showing restraint. The jets seem to be pretty effective at making big holes in the ground, I wouldn't call their demise just yet.
The scoreboard says otherwise. US jets can't even reach the northeastern half of the country because the refueling tankers can't get close enough to give them the range.
Additionally, Iran had deterrence that you're not giving them credit for. If they destroyed Saudi and UAE's water desalination, it would be a mass casualty event.
It would be sufficient to destroy just the Asaluyeh gas infrastructure near the South Pars field. It's easily approached over the open sea where Iran has negligible air defences, and it is rather... flammable. It provides something like 75% of Iran's domestic gas supply and in turn fuels most of their power stations.
Their economy would implode within days.
Of course, this would be a horrific crime against humanity, comparable in impact on civilians to dropping a nuke on a capital city.
Speaking of which: my partner knows next to nothing about warfare and while watching the news I had to explain that the US Navy submarine mentioned by the presenter isn't just for taking out enemy ships, it is a nuclear-armed "world ending" weapon that could simply... erase... a country. Or two. Probably three. In under an hour.
> few F35s and bomber squads could reliably deplete and destroy the entire Iranian drone stock and manufacturing capacity if there was the desire and higher tolerance for civilian casualties
the current admin does not care about civilians casualties. remember the tomahawk on school girls? so what are they waiting for if it was that easy?
Yeah, it's laughable to think that somewhere in the DoD a map labeled like "Iran: Huge Undefended Drone Warehouses" has just been sitting around unused because Hegseth/Trump keep vetoing it on account of potential civilian casualties.
Sure, we could easily wrap this whole thing up a couple days but the admin is choosing to remain stuck in a quagmire that's dooming GOP in the midterms. Based on a moral red line, of all things. Makes perfect sense.
They would need and can manage both fighter jet procurement and drone manufacturing. Although a partnership with Iran, China's close ally, would probably be ill conceived.
There has been one US F35 damaged in combat. That's total, across all the areas its been in and all the countries that have deployed them, starting in 2018. They've been up against the best air defense systems in the world in Venezuela and Iran and they received a single scratch.
The countries acquiring them are doing so because they are best strike fighters on the planet, and it's not even close. Unless you know something that Norway, Japan, England, the Netherlands, etc don't know?
give yourself a break. F-35 doesn't even have long range a2a missiles comparable to PL-17 in service. its radar is 2nd class at best, a full generation behind the Chinese counterpart and heavily rely on Chinese rare earth.
it is 2026 now, partially de-industrialized US no longer has the best weapons in the world. that is why it is struggling to even beat Iran.
Why would Japan mass produce an inferior product when they would easily be able to design and build a far superior one? "Shahed" isn't just another word for drone, it's a specific company's name.
Ultimately the problem is that Japanese people are not having enough kids. It's a huge emergency. It is recoverable, but it has to be done very soon or it will be much harder. Right now, 5.1% of the population is 25-29, prime childbearing years. If all of those people had 2.1 kids, and so did their descendants, Japan's population would stabilize reasonably well. The problem is that the 0-4 range is only 3.1%. Even if that generation has 2.1 kids, the population will be massively diminished.
If that happens, the majority of Japanese people will be retired, and the cost to provide medical care for them will be astronomical compared to the number of people that can provide that care. It's easy to say "Japan is a rich country, they can afford it." However, medical care for old people is very labor intensive. Even if the old people have "savings", this is just a claim against the labor of young people. If the young people are too worn out from caring for their parents to have their own kids, the country dies out.
The only solution I can think of is to provide massive incentives to have kids. Massive meaning something like "you get $40k per year for every kid in your house under 18", or "you get a free house when you have your first kid, and a bigger one when you have your second."
Maybe this sounds extreme, but the alternative is that young people are taxed at punitive rates in order to provide care for older people. As the situation progresses, younger people will have even less kids because they can't afford them, and eventually they won't even be able to pay for a reasonable living standard for themselves. Older people won't care and will vote themselves excellent benefits, since they would have a good majority in voting. The only option younger people would have would be to leave the country, which only forces the tax rates higher. Eventually something breaks. It's difficult to predict exactly how it would go but it's not pretty.
If Japan is to be saved though, it has to happen in the next 5-10 years or so, and the sooner the better. Once the population pyramid slides up another decade, you'd need the average couple to have 4 kids or so, and the incentives required to make that happen are not affordable, and wouldn't be agreed to democratically when the majority of the population is retired and wants the money for the remainder of their lives rather than paying for kids that would be too young to provide labor to care for them while they're alive.
Has any country really reversed the diminishing fertility rate with industrialization without religious zealotry? I honestly don’t think money is the factor here. Yes it matters but $40k is nothing. That covers maybe a year or two of daycare in the states. It needs to be a cultural change but not sure what would reverse it.
Or we set a max age of the population where you off yourself. It’s the plot of Half a Life in Star Trek TNG
>And the government buying 150 F35's is just a slap in the face when there's a massive chunk of the population that is, very quickly, going to need extra care.
I'm torn on this issue. I think the elderly and people in general should get a decent life, but on the opposite side we have Europe that's investing massively more in making its boomers richer and more comfortable than anyone in human history has ever been(average pension in France is now higher than the average salary), rather than investing that money in ensuring opportunities and prosperity of future generations, who are facing economic stagnation/degrowth and are forced to foot the bill for this elderly spending, with the guarantee the pyramid scheme they're funding will fail them when their turn comes to benefit from it.
So perhaps Japan sees the defense capability those 150 F-35's bring to its future national security more valuable than keeping the elderly alive for a few more years.
Yeah, it sounds harsh when you look at people like that, but taking care of people takes resources(money), and money is finite, so all these decisions are a game theory trolley problem, where you have to choose whose lives a country should prioritize the most: the past generations, or the future generations.
Historically in the history of nations would be willing to sacrifice the elderly to prioritize the survival and growth of its future generations, that was the social contract of the tribe, that is until the western boomers came and decided they deserve to fuck the future of their nation if they can get wealthier and feel good till the end.
I'm not saying there's one correct solution here, because I don't have it. I'm saying tough decisions have to be made from which there will be winners and losers, so a nation should choose the winners carefully, if it wishes to have a future.
> average pension in France is now higher than the average salary
This sounded crazy so I looked it up. I don’t think it’s quite true, but after you subtract taxes and living expenses (a lot of old people own their homes) and add investments, seems like retirees do have a higher standard of living than workers in France.
Thanks for looking into that - that claim also surprises me!
It makes sense to subtract the taxes for a comparison between pension and salary, but by taking investments into account, and probably living expenses too, since they depend upon investments, I think you're doing too much work to support that claim.
Presumably it is fairly standard for the average retiree to have more assets/investments than the average worker. Those assets generate income (or reduce living expenses). I think that is too different from the claim that the pension is higher.
Even if Japan believes that spending money on young people is more appropriate than extending the lives of the elderly by a few years, the decision should absolutely not be to purchase large numbers of American fighter jets, but rather to use the funds to improve the birth rate, build infrastructure, transition to green energy, and support domestic industrial productivity.
I cannot understand what purchasing fighter jets can do for Japan. Japan has in fact completely handed over its military sovereignty to the United States, and buying fighter jets is essentially just giving the United States a blood transfusion.
I agree to some degree. There is also the case to be made that whereas in the past, young people would stay at home until they were married, and therefore assist their parents/grandparents, the rapid westernization (or "de-Japanization"?) of Japanese youth has them moving out asap into larger cities to be "free individuals" and those downstream effects on the elderly aren't anyone's fault, I guess.
Can you blame kids (especially those without siblings) wanting to strike out for a life and family of their own?
They don't choose to be born. Have few/no rights to change how they're raised or their parents spend the family funds while they are minors. Often they have no choice over large portions of their education. To say they owe their parents decades of unpaid caregiving is absurd.
I'm speaking from a Japanese cultural point of view, here. To say that Japan has been wrong until now to focus on family values over rampant individualism, waiting until you are married to leave the home, and respecting the lives of the elderly until they pass on is one I've never heard before. And where do you get that their education takes a backseat by living with their parents? Post secondary education has always been a pillar in Japan.
Until this most recent generation Japan (and the rest of the world) had no problem starting a "life and family of their own" as you put it.
From experience, elder care is more of a drain on the younger family members than the elder. It's not just financial either. Needing to take off from work to take the elderly somewhere, making sure they understand the medical situation, etc. Every country/situation is different though. Maybe pensioners in France can afford their own care, but I'm assuming they can't drive themselves to the doctor.
I sincerely wonder how this is going to work given the large divergence in lifestyle preferences between these generations. Real estate especially will be an interesting one - lots of young people either cannot (due to employment situations) or actively choose not to live in the areas that their parents did. What will happen when these houses hit the market? How will this huge supply increase affect the people who do live there? Nobody I know is moving to Pennsyltucky to live in their parents' house even if it's free... will it crater property values for all of the hard-working townies who sunk their money into their own homes?
This is doing a lot of cover for an airplane that has massive supply issues and mostly seems to have been invented to extract more money out of allies to serve the US military industrial complex.
An island nation under the protectorate of the US TOTALLY needs to spend over $300 billion over the needs of their people, okay sure. Makes sense I guess.
Historically those that were greedy were banished from society so the community can continue thrive. How greedy are you willing to be since you're okay with sacrificing other humans for political ploys?
>This is doing a lot of cover for an airplane that has massive supply issues
I'm not covering the damn plane in my comment. I was covering the nation's need for self defense which is gonna cost crazy money any way you slice it if your military wants to have latest gen "sci-fi" jets capable of beating Chinese ones.
>An island nation under the protectorate of the US TOTALLY needs to spend over $300 billion over the needs of their people, okay sure. Makes sense I guess.
The security guarantee that nations, like Japan in this case, receive from the US is not free of charge, it never was. It's paid in barter via purchasing US military gear like F-35s that supports the US economy and defense industry jobs. It's the same deal with the gulf states. Saudi Arabia and the others, accepted to trade their oil only in USD, making the USD the world reserve currency and the US the richest country in the world, and in exchange it received defense assurances form the US. That's always been the deal. Are there still people oblivious to this fact?
Most people think the US just goes around bullying people and kicking up dust. There is a genuine widespread belief that if the US didn't exist, the world would be living in harmonious peace, just like how the world was before WWII.
Yeah I don't think it was a good look for a supposed democratic nation to sell weaponry to nations that rely on slave labor either, but there never was a good look for American imperialism. Still shocked to see people champion it still.
Also, you often don't have a choice, as imperialism is a constant throughout human history. If it's not the US it's gonna be someone else, maybe even worse. Now I'm not American, but if I were, and I'd need to make a choice between my nation being THE imperial power or someone else with different values than mine resulting me being at their mercy, then I'd rather me than them.
But this isn't "championing it", this is choosing the pragmatic least-worst option.
From the article.
>While immigration has risen in previous years, foreigners only make up around 3% of the population and opposition to accepting more has grown.
That 10 USD isn't for you , it's for an immigrant from a less affluent country. The Philippines for one. Although Japan also has a significant South Asian population.
The tradition is you work a horrible job, but your kids get to grow up in a rich country with much better opportunities.
Japan doesn't want immigrants though. They can fix there demographic crisis in a single year by opening immigration up.
As for defense spending. The only issue is its not homegrown tech. Looks like Mitsubishi is actually working on a 6th gen fighter though.
The socialized cost of protecting your castle is massive. It makes for a very popular and very lazy target for this kind of “think of the children” (or centenarians) style rhetoric.
Something I keep in mind when reading these kinds of opinions is that when war breaks out and moves through a region (think Ukraine), the elderly are common among those who cannot flee.
I disagree with downvoting the parent; I did not interpret their post as advocating neglect or euthanasia or anything else of a nasty kind.
There is a point to be made that fewer and fewer people are ready to die - eventually.
However, it arguably is the natural course of things, and the only thing more certain than taxes. I'm not saying this because I cannot imagine a world in which death was switched off. Instead, I would argue that it is also a GOOD thing that death exists, as it makes one's lifetime more precious knowing your days are counted (it's also good not to know how many of them you have left).
There is space made for new generations, and their different (hopefully eventually better) ideas.
I'm advocating for "at 100 years old you're going to die pretty soon regardless of medical spending, and as a centarian, you should be prepared for this. no vanity or medical procedure will be cost effective and the world does not need more supercentarians, and japan does not need more old people. simple as.
These people are over 100, and have been paying tax to the Japanese state since before world war 2. They lived through world war 2, and they rebuilt japan afterwards.
You're proposing to tell them they haven't "done enough", saved enough, paid enough tax, worked enough, sacrificed enough. You're assuming they all have kids to care for them.
20-something billion dollars can pay for a lot of medicine and care that F-35s can't deliver.
Defence is necessary to protect the people. But so is everything else. Medicine, food, affordable housing, education...
If the state wants tons of money and sacrifice, then what is the point of protecting it if it provides nothing in return?
This extends to everyone else in the developed world: if we're fucked anyway, why bother doing all this stuff the government wants? To protect the assets and incomes of the rich? So we can give all our life and labor to the lords and landlords?
I'm not buying it, and I doubt the centenarians are either.
>Why do people think The Government™ is able to, should, or can, solve everyone’s problems?
Where do you see them demanding the government solve $ALL their problems?
>The Government™ probably can solve defence.
Agree.
>It probably can’t solve your lack of desire to do the right thing and look after your aging parents.
Is there a lack of desire? Or a lack of resources resulting as a consequence of how the modern developed economy works, where youth need to move away from the family to get a college education and skilled jobs, and in return the government taxes you to take care of your parents and your kids so that you can focus on maximizing your skilled productivity at work? Isn't this the modern (faulty) social contract?
Sure, I can move back with my parents to take care of them, but then I won't have a job to earn money because all the industry in that town was hollowed out and moved abroad (also thanks to government actions of maximizing shareholder value).
Now , if the government admits it can't solve elderly care and wants us to take care of our parents on our own dime, the it should also stop taxing us for a welfare state it can't provide and just focus on what it can, like defense. IIRC Switzerland works like that.
Unfortunately, in our modern post-industrial economy we can't all go back to tribal/village lifestyles of our ancestors where we all lived on farms in multi generational households and we all took care of each other and lived only off the land. That would sound nice in theory, but it's not feasible anymore the way nations and economies are set up to work and compete against each other, unless we can somehow agree to fight wars from now on only with bows and arrows like our ancestors, instead of AI drones and cruise missiles needing cutting edge chips and SW made by singles with phds and no kids. We built this faulty societal system and now we're forced to live by it whether we want to or not.
Minimizing shareholder value will flatten the economy.
Do you really want to live in a pre-industrial agrarian society? Not me. I like central heating, flush toilets, hot & cold running water, and Led Zeppelin music.
If the community isn't proactive with safety nets for elders, let's say the childless ones, those elders will become everyone's acute problems. Better to plan for it and better to share the cost to everyone. Some might call that a government.
A 100-year-old's children are 70-80 years old themselves, if they are still alive. They very well might be not be capable of taking care of a 100-year-old person. And not everyone has children. Rather than throw up our hands and say "too bad", perhaps we collectively have some responsibility to take care of those who aren't able to take care of themselves?
and those 70-80 year olds may have children old enough to be going through menopause and any number of health issues themselves, along with their own adult children who may not have viable prospects for leaving home yet (if the dynamic is at all similar to other G7 countries). In Canada, I would be plenty old enough by now to have my own kids, and my grandparents, lucky though I am to still have them around, are old enough to be needing some help in their 80s. Thankfully they all have their own homes and can take care of themselves financially, but even if I was interested in having kids, there isn't really a viable financial strategy for creating a support structure viable for even myself long-term. Adding one other person to the mix isn't feasible and won't be in foreseeable future unless I made some dramatic changes solely for that purpose. Thankfully the Gen Xers in my family got in early to the whole "social contract" thing and seem to be handling what they can, and I contribute when I'm visiting by putting in the physical labor where it's useful. I can barely reliably pay for a basement apartment, and the way things are looking, that's about as far as it's ever going to get.
> perhaps we collectively have some responsibility to take care of those who aren't able to take care of themselves
This is the cornerstone that all society rests upon. If a person argues that there is no such obligation, they do not understand the social dynamics of a civilization and you can be sure you're dealing with a sociopath.
We're not making these problems up. Reality exists. These problems exist. The government is doing it because the population is failing to do it on their own. It's very obvious and not up for debate. If it wasn't a problem, the government wouldn't have to do it.
Well, government money IS people's money. Maybe people don't want the government to take of their parents, but would enjoy paying less taxes so they could have money to do it themselves.
Or people can't take care of their parents and grand-parents, because government expenditures transfered wealth from them to the rich via the Cantillon Effect.
Nobody fucks complain about government fiscal profilgacy having enabled the golden age of Venture Capital based Unicorns through an unprecedent period of extreme liquidity in the markets. Nobody fucking ever complains that we went through an era of incredible levels of market concentration because of the fucking State fiscal habits.
But, creating some remedy for woes of a working class that can't even bet some money on some Oracle CDSs, because this is not for NPC retail investors tastes. Yeah, that would be communism! Let them eat croissants!
It's quite amusing how The Government™ is able to use the tax money to buy an overpriced useless military toys which solve nothing and cost trillions, but at the same time The Government™ can't spend that tax money on the care of their citizens.
“A government audit of family registries in Japan in 2010 uncovered more than 230,000 people listed as being aged 100 or older who were unaccounted for, some having died decades previously.
The miscounting was attributed to patchy record-keeping and suspicions that some families may have tried to hide the deaths of elderly relatives in order to claim their pensions“ Thus they need to redo the audit in 2026.
I head similar stories. Also from Italy. Another aspect is that many 100+ year old have questionable birth certificates, as in the record of the birthday might be guessed. Different times back then.
That’s all true, but if you walk around “old people neighbourhoods” even within Tokyo, you’ll realize there are A LOT OF old people. Maybe it’s much more urbanized, and older people are more likely to still go out for groceries and stuff here. But even on the ground it feels like “yeah story tracks”.
I was also thinking about that, but that miscounting story is so old, notable, and well-known by now, that it's basically popular knowledge around the world. So I hope that the BBC, but especially also the Japanese government that the BBC was reporting on, are aware of that issue and have, by now, accounted for it.
Wild that the article goes on about the percentage of centenarians, then just has this brief note about how the data are completely unreliable, and never squares the two sets of statements.
The story is about the fact that the Japanese government is reporting these figures, and what the Japanese government has tried to do and believes that it still needs to do in response to its own figures. That it then goes on to cast doubt on the figures reflects on the Japanese government, not the BBC reporters.
Years ago people warned that we had to limit the population to save the planet.
Now we're naturally reducing population growth, and people warn of disaster.
Gradually decreasing populations means that overall, fewer workers have to support more non-workers. We've had decades of productivity growth, with more to come if we're not stupid, making that extremely feasible.
Yeah, I agree that the "Blue Zone" theory is mostly explained by bad record keeping. Okinawa is one of the poorest areas of Japan, but was deemed a Blue Zone, despite that wealth is nearly always positively correlated with longevity within similar cultures. Low and behold Okinawa had shitty record keeping and tons of incentives for relatives to commit pension fraud.
This is dumb. If you go to any Japanese graveyard in Hawaii (where family graves have prefecture of origin) you will find the preponderance of centenarians are from okinawan families. There is no incentive for pension fraud for someone born in the us (or emigrated to the us in their younger years) and died in the us in the 1980s-> early 20XXs
Sure, but there would have still been the same poor record keeping around birth dates and the same incentives for people in a poor area 60 years ago to enter the workforce early.
Bad record keeping in Hawaii in 1900-1910++? Bad record keeping and misregistering a 8 year old as 18 upon immigration to the territory of Hawaii? What are you proposing here?
I'm looking at a photograph I have with a 1915-2015 and in same frame an immediately adjacent plot for a distinct family which has 1913-2015, both of these deceased almost certainly born in the territory of Hawaii (one site has two 1880s born -- that's probably the immigrants).
Supposing there were bad records and incentives to fudge that persisted into the territory of Hawaii, why would those incentives only exist for Okinawan immigrants in Japan versus immigrants from any other prefecture, including poor ones like those in the south of Honshu or Kyushu!?
Semi-related, but I did recently wonder if China's real-estate bust might serve as a strong fertility support measure / incidental pronatalist policy.
Tier-3 and tier-4 cities supposedly saw 30-50% property value declines, setting them back more than two decades. If real estate was really holding back families, as is often stipulated, this might reverse that.
Otoh, rural Japan has lots of cheap or even free real estate but it doesn't seem to support fertility rates at all.
Real estate is not the only reason why folks have less children, especially in cultures where people don’t mind having less space. Kids are expensive for other reasons in china
I think high housing prices can impact people's decision about when/if they start a family, but other factors do as well. Rural Japan might be inexpensive, but raising a family there can be less attractive for a lot of other reasons.
This. As well as aging population, plus bad economy, no one is making Children. They build an over capacity of kindergardens as well. These are all closing now and people losing their jobs, furthering the (real) sentiment of depression and keeping your wallets and your legs closed…so to say.
It's common enough that the Japanese government has been tracking down long dead "centenarians" to root it out. Also, according to Saul Newman [1], many of the centenarians claimed for Japan actually died 80+ years ago in the war and were never recorded as dead when everyone else in their family died.
First, France already had negative demographic trends during the Napoleonic era. That might help explain why Macron’s call for a “demographic rearmament” is not necessarily taboo today. France started experiencing smaller family sizes quite a long time ago, so the current demographic numbers are partly a reflection of past trends rather than the situation today. In a few years, Italy will probably face an even worse situation.
Second, in some countries, the very high number of elderly people may partly be the result of inaccurate population records. Some countries have a combination of incentives for elderly people and demographic records that were badly damaged during WWII. This may have made it relatively easy for someone to claim that they were, for example, their grandmother and receive benefits. Decades later, some of these people are supposedly over 100 years old.
There is even an Ig Nobel Prize associated with research into this phenomenon.
Probably not. Welfare fraud is really common and the government hasn’t really done much to combat it. This article makes it sound like this is clerical error driven but the stories in the news say otherwise.
We have travelled for about a month in Japan last year. They work under constant stress, lots of commute on public transit. I also did not feel their food was that healthy, lots of fried food and sweets. But the portion is small compared to what we would normally eat in a meal.
Did you actually visit Japanese families, or is that assessment based on what you saw in convenience stores and similar? "Convenience" food and western style food has somewhat increased, but on average Japanese cuisine is very healthy.
I also agree on the stressful work part, but don't quite understand what you mean with "lots of commute on public transit". If you mean the Tokyo-style rush hour traffic where people are literally shoved into the train car, of course that's stressful. But at any other time apart from that, Japan's public transit is enormously soothing and stress-free, both because of culture and transit technology.
Yeah, I'd agree. I think that the Japan's public transportation, even in Tokyo, wasn't at all stressful. Maybe I'd feel differently if I had to be shoved in, but that was easy enough to avoid and even at the times when it was a little crowded for my tastes, it was still a great experience.
Day in day out, everyday in public transit, just sheer noise would not add any lifetime. We stayed at our Japanese friend’s house so we did have exposure to their everyday life. The point I want to make is that many things contribute to a long life, and of course Japanese people are doing most of those things right, regardless of what that might be. I remember watching a documentary about Okinawa people. One thing they mentioned was laughter.
I grew up in Germany. For the past 13 years, I've lived in the US. Oh, how I wish I could go back to the "day in day out, everyday in public transit" instead of this car hell. In Germany, just like in Japan, I didn't feel that it was noisy at all. It was clean and quiet and soothing, I could just sit there and relax. Everyone takes public transport, across all income ranges.
As a result, public life itself is more quiet and soothing, because you are not constantly surrounded by cars, even if just sitting outside a café.
What exactly did you eat the entire time? tonkatsu and karaage?
there's plenty of great home style food that isn't fried.. nikujaga, gyusuji, nikudofu, etc.
Public transit there is pretty great. If anything the lack of escalators for some stations can be unmotivating to some people but on the other hand walking a lot of flights of stairs is healthy.
It's not a snarky reply. It's important IMO that people realize the consistently top rated transit system in the world is nearly all private. Otherwise, they push for public transit, not realizing they are asking for something different.
Except that is not the definition of "public transportation" being used in this context; OP is clearly referring to transportation that the public uses to commute. They're hardly referring to its ownership.
Surely the exercise that comes with using public transport outweighs that. I feel like being able to zone out and not having to focus on driving, is more relaxing to me.
This article calls it a "quiet emergency" but even as a foreigner living in Japan there are alarm bells everywhere. And the government buying 150 F35's is just a slap in the face when there's a massive chunk of the population that is, very quickly, going to need extra care.
I looked into becoming a care aid myself as I'm tired of office culture in Japan and have some experience in that field. I was shocked to see that they start at less than 10USD, and working your way up takes years, decades even.
Continuing to kick this can down the road is going to be an absolute disaster.
> buying 150 F35's
Your immediate neighbor is going on an imperialist streak right now, and Xi says he wants the fireworks to start in his lifetime. I don't know if F35s are the right answer for Japan, but Xi isn't that young. Get ready however you can.
The ministry of propaganda in China runs an English language international news channel available as an IPTV stream (https://tvexplorer.live/)
If you want a better understanding of which world events China is not happy about, tuning in there to see what they cover unfavorably has been useful for me.
They seem to be very unhappy about Japan building up its war fighting capacity.
> They seem to be very unhappy about Japan building up its war fighting capacity.
Maybe because of Japan's history of horrific war crimes and occupation in China? You know, the actual imperial conquest for which their constitution prohibits them from having a standing air force?
+15 Social Credit!
Por que no los dos?
Japan is never going to voluntarily attack China. Even if there was a desire to, they know they could not win. Any military build up by the former is due to fear of the latter.
Japan probably won't not attack China (I don't see why they would, not proactively at least), that's not what was being asserted. Japan however may defend Taiwan or allies/neighbors in the south china sea should things go hot there elsewise. And Japan have stated at least some interest in doing so which means that if China wants Taiwan, they might have to contend with japan.
These sort of things can work as a deterrent as much as power projection, and they don't have to get into direct violent/physical conflict for there to be diplomatic tension/worsening of relations as a result. I'm not saying this is most effective use of Japan's resources or focus or that China is for sure going to do anything or making any other such claims, just explaining the potential rational for why China would be non-plussed at Japan over F35 purchases even if they don't feel Japan is gunning for them.
Of course, if china has no actual wartime intentions in Japans sphere of influence, then yeah, they probably give much less of a shit. So depends on what their intentions really are as to how they feel about it. The fact that they're publicly broadcasting displeasure is probably not a sign that they're cool with it though.
Any protest from China is just painting themselves as being in a defensive position, whilst they make claims over the oceans and territories that the international community disagrees with. Very much not defensive acts.
It's the Putin playbook. "It's NATO's fault we need to kill Ukranians!"
It's wild that people say this. Japan attacking China (and later the Western colonies, and later the US) knowing that it could not win was one of the most important events in the 20th century. There isn't a country as infamous as Japan for starting wars it cannot win.
Also that attack happened on Sept 18, this very day, in 1931.
Not so wild when you realise that it's not the 1930s, and Japan isn't being led by an imperialist & expansionist regime. I'm not denying any past aggression from Japan, my grandparents fought them, but the situation is quite different now.
All of the people responsible for that are dead now. Every single one. Maybe there are still 100k people alive that were ~5yo at the time, but I don't think we can hold them culpable.
The person you're afraid of conquering you not liking that you're trying to defend yourself against conquest is not an argument against doing that.
I don't think anything in their post said otherwise. I assumed they were just adding more evidence on to what the previous commenter was saying.
The strange and ironic thing here is that the subject and object of this statement can be either country.
My wife is from Manchuria and my father is from Singapore. As much as my wife and I like the Japan of today, Japan appeared less favourably in our family history.
I presume you mean CGTN?
>They seem to be very unhappy about Japan building up its war fighting capacity.
Could be a strategy going on here.
Before they invaded Ukraine, Russia criticized Ukrainian military buildup as "destabalising". Probably with full knowledge of their own plans to invade.
Active-duty armed personnel stormed a neighboring country's embassy with a knife. It’s really hard to guess who is pursuing expansion.
The F-35s are for the children and grandchildren. It's to safeguard their future.
Democracy is important and it isn't free.
If the Japanese are looking for technology to protect themselves against a heavily armed imperial force they should be mass producing Shaheds instead of paying tributes to the US MIC.
Shahed drone's are not serious weapons of war. Japan could easily produce millions of them if needed. The drones are good for antagonizing and terrorising a civilian population. A few F35s and bomber squads could reliably deplete and destroy the entire Iranian drone stock and manufacturing capacity if there was the desire and higher tolerance for civilian casualties.
In other words if Japan were in a position where they were willing to use drones to indiscriminately attack soft targets an F-35 would be about a trillion times more effective.
> The drones are good for antagonizing and terrorising [sic] a civilian population. A few F35s and bomber squads could reliably deplete and destroy the entire Iranian drone stock and manufacturing capacity if there was the desire and higher tolerance for civilian casualties.
Absolutely incorrect.
- The purpose of these drones is to establish deterrence.
- US is not capable of reaching every inch of Iranian airspace with F-35s unless it is willing to accept a significant casualty rate among pilots.
- Even if they could, the US has not been able to decimate Iran's drone stockpile even in the areas it can ~safely reach.
The age of the fighter jet is over.
Quite possibly. But shaheds aren't the answer either. After Fukushima, the plutonium 240 fuel for the breeders they don't want to run anymore has been piling up. Not as good as 239, but that is what they should be looking at.
Because of stealth jets, the US is capable of destroying every single power plant in the country, with all the horrible human cost you would expect. Exactly like Putin has been trying to do in Ukraine. Except, they could actually do it.
Trump and Hegseth may be bumbling idiots but so far they have been showing restraint. The jets seem to be pretty effective at making big holes in the ground, I wouldn't call their demise just yet.
The scoreboard says otherwise. US jets can't even reach the northeastern half of the country because the refueling tankers can't get close enough to give them the range.
Additionally, Iran had deterrence that you're not giving them credit for. If they destroyed Saudi and UAE's water desalination, it would be a mass casualty event.
It would be sufficient to destroy just the Asaluyeh gas infrastructure near the South Pars field. It's easily approached over the open sea where Iran has negligible air defences, and it is rather... flammable. It provides something like 75% of Iran's domestic gas supply and in turn fuels most of their power stations.
Their economy would implode within days.
Of course, this would be a horrific crime against humanity, comparable in impact on civilians to dropping a nuke on a capital city.
Speaking of which: my partner knows next to nothing about warfare and while watching the news I had to explain that the US Navy submarine mentioned by the presenter isn't just for taking out enemy ships, it is a nuclear-armed "world ending" weapon that could simply... erase... a country. Or two. Probably three. In under an hour.
They were serious enough to defeat the US Navy and Air Force..
> few F35s and bomber squads could reliably deplete and destroy the entire Iranian drone stock and manufacturing capacity if there was the desire and higher tolerance for civilian casualties
the current admin does not care about civilians casualties. remember the tomahawk on school girls? so what are they waiting for if it was that easy?
Yeah, it's laughable to think that somewhere in the DoD a map labeled like "Iran: Huge Undefended Drone Warehouses" has just been sitting around unused because Hegseth/Trump keep vetoing it on account of potential civilian casualties.
Sure, we could easily wrap this whole thing up a couple days but the admin is choosing to remain stuck in a quagmire that's dooming GOP in the midterms. Based on a moral red line, of all things. Makes perfect sense.
They would need and can manage both fighter jet procurement and drone manufacturing. Although a partnership with Iran, China's close ally, would probably be ill conceived.
They should be mass producing Iran's drone?
They certainly should not be buying 150 f35s judging by recent track records.
There has been one US F35 damaged in combat. That's total, across all the areas its been in and all the countries that have deployed them, starting in 2018. They've been up against the best air defense systems in the world in Venezuela and Iran and they received a single scratch.
The countries acquiring them are doing so because they are best strike fighters on the planet, and it's not even close. Unless you know something that Norway, Japan, England, the Netherlands, etc don't know?
give yourself a break. F-35 doesn't even have long range a2a missiles comparable to PL-17 in service. its radar is 2nd class at best, a full generation behind the Chinese counterpart and heavily rely on Chinese rare earth.
it is 2026 now, partially de-industrialized US no longer has the best weapons in the world. that is why it is struggling to even beat Iran.
who is winning that war right now?
Holy non-sequitur batman.
Why would Japan mass produce an inferior product when they would easily be able to design and build a far superior one? "Shahed" isn't just another word for drone, it's a specific company's name.
Ultimately the problem is that Japanese people are not having enough kids. It's a huge emergency. It is recoverable, but it has to be done very soon or it will be much harder. Right now, 5.1% of the population is 25-29, prime childbearing years. If all of those people had 2.1 kids, and so did their descendants, Japan's population would stabilize reasonably well. The problem is that the 0-4 range is only 3.1%. Even if that generation has 2.1 kids, the population will be massively diminished.
If that happens, the majority of Japanese people will be retired, and the cost to provide medical care for them will be astronomical compared to the number of people that can provide that care. It's easy to say "Japan is a rich country, they can afford it." However, medical care for old people is very labor intensive. Even if the old people have "savings", this is just a claim against the labor of young people. If the young people are too worn out from caring for their parents to have their own kids, the country dies out.
The only solution I can think of is to provide massive incentives to have kids. Massive meaning something like "you get $40k per year for every kid in your house under 18", or "you get a free house when you have your first kid, and a bigger one when you have your second."
Maybe this sounds extreme, but the alternative is that young people are taxed at punitive rates in order to provide care for older people. As the situation progresses, younger people will have even less kids because they can't afford them, and eventually they won't even be able to pay for a reasonable living standard for themselves. Older people won't care and will vote themselves excellent benefits, since they would have a good majority in voting. The only option younger people would have would be to leave the country, which only forces the tax rates higher. Eventually something breaks. It's difficult to predict exactly how it would go but it's not pretty.
If Japan is to be saved though, it has to happen in the next 5-10 years or so, and the sooner the better. Once the population pyramid slides up another decade, you'd need the average couple to have 4 kids or so, and the incentives required to make that happen are not affordable, and wouldn't be agreed to democratically when the majority of the population is retired and wants the money for the remainder of their lives rather than paying for kids that would be too young to provide labor to care for them while they're alive.
Has any country really reversed the diminishing fertility rate with industrialization without religious zealotry? I honestly don’t think money is the factor here. Yes it matters but $40k is nothing. That covers maybe a year or two of daycare in the states. It needs to be a cultural change but not sure what would reverse it.
Or we set a max age of the population where you off yourself. It’s the plot of Half a Life in Star Trek TNG
>And the government buying 150 F35's is just a slap in the face when there's a massive chunk of the population that is, very quickly, going to need extra care.
I'm torn on this issue. I think the elderly and people in general should get a decent life, but on the opposite side we have Europe that's investing massively more in making its boomers richer and more comfortable than anyone in human history has ever been(average pension in France is now higher than the average salary), rather than investing that money in ensuring opportunities and prosperity of future generations, who are facing economic stagnation/degrowth and are forced to foot the bill for this elderly spending, with the guarantee the pyramid scheme they're funding will fail them when their turn comes to benefit from it.
So perhaps Japan sees the defense capability those 150 F-35's bring to its future national security more valuable than keeping the elderly alive for a few more years.
Yeah, it sounds harsh when you look at people like that, but taking care of people takes resources(money), and money is finite, so all these decisions are a game theory trolley problem, where you have to choose whose lives a country should prioritize the most: the past generations, or the future generations.
Historically in the history of nations would be willing to sacrifice the elderly to prioritize the survival and growth of its future generations, that was the social contract of the tribe, that is until the western boomers came and decided they deserve to fuck the future of their nation if they can get wealthier and feel good till the end.
I'm not saying there's one correct solution here, because I don't have it. I'm saying tough decisions have to be made from which there will be winners and losers, so a nation should choose the winners carefully, if it wishes to have a future.
> average pension in France is now higher than the average salary
This sounded crazy so I looked it up. I don’t think it’s quite true, but after you subtract taxes and living expenses (a lot of old people own their homes) and add investments, seems like retirees do have a higher standard of living than workers in France.
Thanks for looking into that - that claim also surprises me!
It makes sense to subtract the taxes for a comparison between pension and salary, but by taking investments into account, and probably living expenses too, since they depend upon investments, I think you're doing too much work to support that claim.
Presumably it is fairly standard for the average retiree to have more assets/investments than the average worker. Those assets generate income (or reduce living expenses). I think that is too different from the claim that the pension is higher.
Even if Japan believes that spending money on young people is more appropriate than extending the lives of the elderly by a few years, the decision should absolutely not be to purchase large numbers of American fighter jets, but rather to use the funds to improve the birth rate, build infrastructure, transition to green energy, and support domestic industrial productivity. I cannot understand what purchasing fighter jets can do for Japan. Japan has in fact completely handed over its military sovereignty to the United States, and buying fighter jets is essentially just giving the United States a blood transfusion.
I agree to some degree. There is also the case to be made that whereas in the past, young people would stay at home until they were married, and therefore assist their parents/grandparents, the rapid westernization (or "de-Japanization"?) of Japanese youth has them moving out asap into larger cities to be "free individuals" and those downstream effects on the elderly aren't anyone's fault, I guess.
Can you blame kids (especially those without siblings) wanting to strike out for a life and family of their own?
They don't choose to be born. Have few/no rights to change how they're raised or their parents spend the family funds while they are minors. Often they have no choice over large portions of their education. To say they owe their parents decades of unpaid caregiving is absurd.
I'm speaking from a Japanese cultural point of view, here. To say that Japan has been wrong until now to focus on family values over rampant individualism, waiting until you are married to leave the home, and respecting the lives of the elderly until they pass on is one I've never heard before. And where do you get that their education takes a backseat by living with their parents? Post secondary education has always been a pillar in Japan.
Until this most recent generation Japan (and the rest of the world) had no problem starting a "life and family of their own" as you put it.
From experience, elder care is more of a drain on the younger family members than the elder. It's not just financial either. Needing to take off from work to take the elderly somewhere, making sure they understand the medical situation, etc. Every country/situation is different though. Maybe pensioners in France can afford their own care, but I'm assuming they can't drive themselves to the doctor.
When those boomers die where does the money go?
Tax man, funeral industry, late life casino runs, o o o o o o an investment in GVC gold
The single biggest generational transfer of wealth in human history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Wealth_Transfer
I sincerely wonder how this is going to work given the large divergence in lifestyle preferences between these generations. Real estate especially will be an interesting one - lots of young people either cannot (due to employment situations) or actively choose not to live in the areas that their parents did. What will happen when these houses hit the market? How will this huge supply increase affect the people who do live there? Nobody I know is moving to Pennsyltucky to live in their parents' house even if it's free... will it crater property values for all of the hard-working townies who sunk their money into their own homes?
Musk, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Gates, Bezos.
Even though they have some money their wealth is trivial compared to the generational transfer.
This is doing a lot of cover for an airplane that has massive supply issues and mostly seems to have been invented to extract more money out of allies to serve the US military industrial complex.
An island nation under the protectorate of the US TOTALLY needs to spend over $300 billion over the needs of their people, okay sure. Makes sense I guess.
Historically those that were greedy were banished from society so the community can continue thrive. How greedy are you willing to be since you're okay with sacrificing other humans for political ploys?
>This is doing a lot of cover for an airplane that has massive supply issues
I'm not covering the damn plane in my comment. I was covering the nation's need for self defense which is gonna cost crazy money any way you slice it if your military wants to have latest gen "sci-fi" jets capable of beating Chinese ones.
>An island nation under the protectorate of the US TOTALLY needs to spend over $300 billion over the needs of their people, okay sure. Makes sense I guess.
The security guarantee that nations, like Japan in this case, receive from the US is not free of charge, it never was. It's paid in barter via purchasing US military gear like F-35s that supports the US economy and defense industry jobs. It's the same deal with the gulf states. Saudi Arabia and the others, accepted to trade their oil only in USD, making the USD the world reserve currency and the US the richest country in the world, and in exchange it received defense assurances form the US. That's always been the deal. Are there still people oblivious to this fact?
>Are there still people oblivious to this fact?
Most people think the US just goes around bullying people and kicking up dust. There is a genuine widespread belief that if the US didn't exist, the world would be living in harmonious peace, just like how the world was before WWII.
And WW1 came out of nowhere and nobody wanted it.
Yeah I don't think it was a good look for a supposed democratic nation to sell weaponry to nations that rely on slave labor either, but there never was a good look for American imperialism. Still shocked to see people champion it still.
> Still shocked to see people champion it still.
Can you share who here is championing it?
Also, you often don't have a choice, as imperialism is a constant throughout human history. If it's not the US it's gonna be someone else, maybe even worse. Now I'm not American, but if I were, and I'd need to make a choice between my nation being THE imperial power or someone else with different values than mine resulting me being at their mercy, then I'd rather me than them.
But this isn't "championing it", this is choosing the pragmatic least-worst option.
From the article. >While immigration has risen in previous years, foreigners only make up around 3% of the population and opposition to accepting more has grown.
That 10 USD isn't for you , it's for an immigrant from a less affluent country. The Philippines for one. Although Japan also has a significant South Asian population.
The tradition is you work a horrible job, but your kids get to grow up in a rich country with much better opportunities.
Japan doesn't want immigrants though. They can fix there demographic crisis in a single year by opening immigration up.
As for defense spending. The only issue is its not homegrown tech. Looks like Mitsubishi is actually working on a 6th gen fighter though.
> Japan doesn't want immigrants though. They can fix there demographic crisis in a single year by opening immigration up.
'fixing' one issue by swapping it out for another
Whats the other issue? Immigrants? That's a bit racist.
Yes, too much immigration all at once can infact stil be a problem, just a different one from an inverted population pyramid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migrant_crisis
The socialized cost of protecting your castle is massive. It makes for a very popular and very lazy target for this kind of “think of the children” (or centenarians) style rhetoric.
Something I keep in mind when reading these kinds of opinions is that when war breaks out and moves through a region (think Ukraine), the elderly are common among those who cannot flee.
investing in senior people is not good ROI but at the same time they are the ones who vote the most...
> very quickly, going to need extra care.
they don't "need" extra care, and at 100 years old, should be pretty content with concepts of dying without intervention.
What is with the obsession in the world today about those on deaths door taking precedent over those who live today?
Wtf is going on with the discourse here lately? Are you advocating for effective "euthanasia" by neglect?
I disagree with downvoting the parent; I did not interpret their post as advocating neglect or euthanasia or anything else of a nasty kind.
There is a point to be made that fewer and fewer people are ready to die - eventually.
However, it arguably is the natural course of things, and the only thing more certain than taxes. I'm not saying this because I cannot imagine a world in which death was switched off. Instead, I would argue that it is also a GOOD thing that death exists, as it makes one's lifetime more precious knowing your days are counted (it's also good not to know how many of them you have left). There is space made for new generations, and their different (hopefully eventually better) ideas.
I'm advocating for "at 100 years old you're going to die pretty soon regardless of medical spending, and as a centarian, you should be prepared for this. no vanity or medical procedure will be cost effective and the world does not need more supercentarians, and japan does not need more old people. simple as.
A lot of people really want to get their hands on the savings of the elderly, and are very angry when they see old people spending money.
What does buying one hundred and fifty F35 aircraft have to do with not being able care for your parents / grandparents?
Why do people think The Government™ is able to, should, or can, solve everyone’s problems?
The Government™ probably can solve defence.
It probably can’t solve your lack of desire to do the right thing and look after your aging parents.
These people are over 100, and have been paying tax to the Japanese state since before world war 2. They lived through world war 2, and they rebuilt japan afterwards.
You're proposing to tell them they haven't "done enough", saved enough, paid enough tax, worked enough, sacrificed enough. You're assuming they all have kids to care for them.
20-something billion dollars can pay for a lot of medicine and care that F-35s can't deliver.
Defence is necessary to protect the people. But so is everything else. Medicine, food, affordable housing, education...
If the state wants tons of money and sacrifice, then what is the point of protecting it if it provides nothing in return?
This extends to everyone else in the developed world: if we're fucked anyway, why bother doing all this stuff the government wants? To protect the assets and incomes of the rich? So we can give all our life and labor to the lords and landlords?
I'm not buying it, and I doubt the centenarians are either.
Their kids are in the 70s and 80s too
>Why do people think The Government™ is able to, should, or can, solve everyone’s problems?
Where do you see them demanding the government solve $ALL their problems?
>The Government™ probably can solve defence.
Agree.
>It probably can’t solve your lack of desire to do the right thing and look after your aging parents.
Is there a lack of desire? Or a lack of resources resulting as a consequence of how the modern developed economy works, where youth need to move away from the family to get a college education and skilled jobs, and in return the government taxes you to take care of your parents and your kids so that you can focus on maximizing your skilled productivity at work? Isn't this the modern (faulty) social contract?
Sure, I can move back with my parents to take care of them, but then I won't have a job to earn money because all the industry in that town was hollowed out and moved abroad (also thanks to government actions of maximizing shareholder value).
Now , if the government admits it can't solve elderly care and wants us to take care of our parents on our own dime, the it should also stop taxing us for a welfare state it can't provide and just focus on what it can, like defense. IIRC Switzerland works like that.
Unfortunately, in our modern post-industrial economy we can't all go back to tribal/village lifestyles of our ancestors where we all lived on farms in multi generational households and we all took care of each other and lived only off the land. That would sound nice in theory, but it's not feasible anymore the way nations and economies are set up to work and compete against each other, unless we can somehow agree to fight wars from now on only with bows and arrows like our ancestors, instead of AI drones and cruise missiles needing cutting edge chips and SW made by singles with phds and no kids. We built this faulty societal system and now we're forced to live by it whether we want to or not.
> maximizing shareholder value
Minimizing shareholder value will flatten the economy.
Do you really want to live in a pre-industrial agrarian society? Not me. I like central heating, flush toilets, hot & cold running water, and Led Zeppelin music.
If the community isn't proactive with safety nets for elders, let's say the childless ones, those elders will become everyone's acute problems. Better to plan for it and better to share the cost to everyone. Some might call that a government.
The Japanese fail to produce enough children.
The country will either have to change or it will disappear soon.
Most European countries have the same issue, but it is less visible due to immigration, which Japan does not have.
The population of Japan is projected to be 64 million in 2100. In 1930, the population of Japan was 64 million. Did it not exist back then?
Japan can easily operate with 60-80 million people in a country slightly smaller than California. And expand again in the future why not?
To be fair you'd need to consider how the percentage of young people looked in 1930 for that to be a meaningful comparison to today
A 100-year-old's children are 70-80 years old themselves, if they are still alive. They very well might be not be capable of taking care of a 100-year-old person. And not everyone has children. Rather than throw up our hands and say "too bad", perhaps we collectively have some responsibility to take care of those who aren't able to take care of themselves?
and those 70-80 year olds may have children old enough to be going through menopause and any number of health issues themselves, along with their own adult children who may not have viable prospects for leaving home yet (if the dynamic is at all similar to other G7 countries). In Canada, I would be plenty old enough by now to have my own kids, and my grandparents, lucky though I am to still have them around, are old enough to be needing some help in their 80s. Thankfully they all have their own homes and can take care of themselves financially, but even if I was interested in having kids, there isn't really a viable financial strategy for creating a support structure viable for even myself long-term. Adding one other person to the mix isn't feasible and won't be in foreseeable future unless I made some dramatic changes solely for that purpose. Thankfully the Gen Xers in my family got in early to the whole "social contract" thing and seem to be handling what they can, and I contribute when I'm visiting by putting in the physical labor where it's useful. I can barely reliably pay for a basement apartment, and the way things are looking, that's about as far as it's ever going to get.
> perhaps we collectively have some responsibility to take care of those who aren't able to take care of themselves
This is the cornerstone that all society rests upon. If a person argues that there is no such obligation, they do not understand the social dynamics of a civilization and you can be sure you're dealing with a sociopath.
You certainly live up to your name.
you’re on HN and it’s as if you’ve never even heard of “thinking in systems”
Well, you see, when people invest their resources in any venture, they incur an "opportunity" cost.
We're not making these problems up. Reality exists. These problems exist. The government is doing it because the population is failing to do it on their own. It's very obvious and not up for debate. If it wasn't a problem, the government wouldn't have to do it.
> If it wasn't a problem, the government wouldn't have to do it.
This is certainly very different from my experience with what governments think they have to do.
Well, government money IS people's money. Maybe people don't want the government to take of their parents, but would enjoy paying less taxes so they could have money to do it themselves.
Or people can't take care of their parents and grand-parents, because government expenditures transfered wealth from them to the rich via the Cantillon Effect.
Nobody fucks complain about government fiscal profilgacy having enabled the golden age of Venture Capital based Unicorns through an unprecedent period of extreme liquidity in the markets. Nobody fucking ever complains that we went through an era of incredible levels of market concentration because of the fucking State fiscal habits.
But, creating some remedy for woes of a working class that can't even bet some money on some Oracle CDSs, because this is not for NPC retail investors tastes. Yeah, that would be communism! Let them eat croissants!
It's quite amusing how The Government™ is able to use the tax money to buy an overpriced useless military toys which solve nothing and cost trillions, but at the same time The Government™ can't spend that tax money on the care of their citizens.
“A government audit of family registries in Japan in 2010 uncovered more than 230,000 people listed as being aged 100 or older who were unaccounted for, some having died decades previously. The miscounting was attributed to patchy record-keeping and suspicions that some families may have tried to hide the deaths of elderly relatives in order to claim their pensions“ Thus they need to redo the audit in 2026.
I head similar stories. Also from Italy. Another aspect is that many 100+ year old have questionable birth certificates, as in the record of the birthday might be guessed. Different times back then.
That’s all true, but if you walk around “old people neighbourhoods” even within Tokyo, you’ll realize there are A LOT OF old people. Maybe it’s much more urbanized, and older people are more likely to still go out for groceries and stuff here. But even on the ground it feels like “yeah story tracks”.
I was also thinking about that, but that miscounting story is so old, notable, and well-known by now, that it's basically popular knowledge around the world. So I hope that the BBC, but especially also the Japanese government that the BBC was reporting on, are aware of that issue and have, by now, accounted for it.
Wild that the article goes on about the percentage of centenarians, then just has this brief note about how the data are completely unreliable, and never squares the two sets of statements.
The story is about the fact that the Japanese government is reporting these figures, and what the Japanese government has tried to do and believes that it still needs to do in response to its own figures. That it then goes on to cast doubt on the figures reflects on the Japanese government, not the BBC reporters.
Years ago people warned that we had to limit the population to save the planet.
Now we're naturally reducing population growth, and people warn of disaster.
Gradually decreasing populations means that overall, fewer workers have to support more non-workers. We've had decades of productivity growth, with more to come if we're not stupid, making that extremely feasible.
But that productivity goes more and more to capital instead of labor, making it much less feasible.
The secret to extreme long life is bad record keeping.
https://theonion.com/134-year-old-man-attributes-longevity-t...
Yeah, I agree that the "Blue Zone" theory is mostly explained by bad record keeping. Okinawa is one of the poorest areas of Japan, but was deemed a Blue Zone, despite that wealth is nearly always positively correlated with longevity within similar cultures. Low and behold Okinawa had shitty record keeping and tons of incentives for relatives to commit pension fraud.
This is dumb. If you go to any Japanese graveyard in Hawaii (where family graves have prefecture of origin) you will find the preponderance of centenarians are from okinawan families. There is no incentive for pension fraud for someone born in the us (or emigrated to the us in their younger years) and died in the us in the 1980s-> early 20XXs
Sure, but there would have still been the same poor record keeping around birth dates and the same incentives for people in a poor area 60 years ago to enter the workforce early.
Bad record keeping in Hawaii in 1900-1910++? Bad record keeping and misregistering a 8 year old as 18 upon immigration to the territory of Hawaii? What are you proposing here?
I'm looking at a photograph I have with a 1915-2015 and in same frame an immediately adjacent plot for a distinct family which has 1913-2015, both of these deceased almost certainly born in the territory of Hawaii (one site has two 1880s born -- that's probably the immigrants).
Supposing there were bad records and incentives to fudge that persisted into the territory of Hawaii, why would those incentives only exist for Okinawan immigrants in Japan versus immigrants from any other prefecture, including poor ones like those in the south of Honshu or Kyushu!?
Semi-related, but I did recently wonder if China's real-estate bust might serve as a strong fertility support measure / incidental pronatalist policy.
Tier-3 and tier-4 cities supposedly saw 30-50% property value declines, setting them back more than two decades. If real estate was really holding back families, as is often stipulated, this might reverse that.
Otoh, rural Japan has lots of cheap or even free real estate but it doesn't seem to support fertility rates at all.
Real estate is not the only reason why folks have less children, especially in cultures where people don’t mind having less space. Kids are expensive for other reasons in china
The other reason is car seats. I can’t fit more than two and I’ll be damned if I trade in for a minivan!
I think high housing prices can impact people's decision about when/if they start a family, but other factors do as well. Rural Japan might be inexpensive, but raising a family there can be less attractive for a lot of other reasons.
> If real estate was really holding back families, as is often stipulated, this might reverse that.
It doesn't matter how much the property is valued if your work is somewhere else.
because there is no work in rural area, why you not asking the same question why younger people move to city at their 20s ??
This. As well as aging population, plus bad economy, no one is making Children. They build an over capacity of kindergardens as well. These are all closing now and people losing their jobs, furthering the (real) sentiment of depression and keeping your wallets and your legs closed…so to say.
How common is pension fraud in Japan?
It's common enough that the Japanese government has been tracking down long dead "centenarians" to root it out. Also, according to Saul Newman [1], many of the centenarians claimed for Japan actually died 80+ years ago in the war and were never recorded as dead when everyone else in their family died.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZE5ml7a6rE
> What are Japan and France doing so much better?
I think the question misunderstands the data.
Or more specifically, a big part of the answer is "not having kids." Think about the denominator.
And why is Japan so obsessed with french things?
I have two hypotheses.
First, France already had negative demographic trends during the Napoleonic era. That might help explain why Macron’s call for a “demographic rearmament” is not necessarily taboo today. France started experiencing smaller family sizes quite a long time ago, so the current demographic numbers are partly a reflection of past trends rather than the situation today. In a few years, Italy will probably face an even worse situation.
Second, in some countries, the very high number of elderly people may partly be the result of inaccurate population records. Some countries have a combination of incentives for elderly people and demographic records that were badly damaged during WWII. This may have made it relatively easy for someone to claim that they were, for example, their grandmother and receive benefits. Decades later, some of these people are supposedly over 100 years old.
There is even an Ig Nobel Prize associated with research into this phenomenon.
Smoking
One would say a leisurely life in France, but on the other hand, the Japanese are not known to take a leisurely approach to life.
Isn’t this often attributed to social security fraud? The family member dies, but the checks keep getting cashed.
The more salient point is why is this happening.
That is to say, it also mean less and less younger people, as 'modernity' induces fewer marriages and fewer children.
It's pretty easy to follow if you know which neoliberal polity forced Japan to abandon traditionalism.
yep. That, and also the porn.
Probably not. Welfare fraud is really common and the government hasn’t really done much to combat it. This article makes it sound like this is clerical error driven but the stories in the news say otherwise.
In America too!
88% are women.
"Residents aged 65 and older currently make up around 30% of the population and are expected to make up nearly 40% by 2070."
that is insane, having half of population is aging grandma is absolutely mind blowing
Obligatory note about most centenarians not having verifiable birth records.
Japan is quite a bit different in that regard since they have family registries. Their issue tends to be death records.
The blue zone.
We have travelled for about a month in Japan last year. They work under constant stress, lots of commute on public transit. I also did not feel their food was that healthy, lots of fried food and sweets. But the portion is small compared to what we would normally eat in a meal.
Did you actually visit Japanese families, or is that assessment based on what you saw in convenience stores and similar? "Convenience" food and western style food has somewhat increased, but on average Japanese cuisine is very healthy.
I also agree on the stressful work part, but don't quite understand what you mean with "lots of commute on public transit". If you mean the Tokyo-style rush hour traffic where people are literally shoved into the train car, of course that's stressful. But at any other time apart from that, Japan's public transit is enormously soothing and stress-free, both because of culture and transit technology.
Yeah, I'd agree. I think that the Japan's public transportation, even in Tokyo, wasn't at all stressful. Maybe I'd feel differently if I had to be shoved in, but that was easy enough to avoid and even at the times when it was a little crowded for my tastes, it was still a great experience.
Day in day out, everyday in public transit, just sheer noise would not add any lifetime. We stayed at our Japanese friend’s house so we did have exposure to their everyday life. The point I want to make is that many things contribute to a long life, and of course Japanese people are doing most of those things right, regardless of what that might be. I remember watching a documentary about Okinawa people. One thing they mentioned was laughter.
Japanese public transport is insanely quiet! No talking, no phones ringing... It's my happy place.
I grew up in Germany. For the past 13 years, I've lived in the US. Oh, how I wish I could go back to the "day in day out, everyday in public transit" instead of this car hell. In Germany, just like in Japan, I didn't feel that it was noisy at all. It was clean and quiet and soothing, I could just sit there and relax. Everyone takes public transport, across all income ranges.
As a result, public life itself is more quiet and soothing, because you are not constantly surrounded by cars, even if just sitting outside a café.
As for the family you stayed at, they must eat differently from the Japanese families I know personally. Studies agree: https://www.livescience.com/54133-japanese-diet-longer-life.... https://chns.cpc.unc.edu/resources/publications/bib/2884/
What exactly did you eat the entire time? tonkatsu and karaage?
there's plenty of great home style food that isn't fried.. nikujaga, gyusuji, nikudofu, etc.
Public transit there is pretty great. If anything the lack of escalators for some stations can be unmotivating to some people but on the other hand walking a lot of flights of stairs is healthy.
Private transit there is pretty great
Corrected that for you.
this is HN not reddit. no need for snarky replies.
It's not a snarky reply. It's important IMO that people realize the consistently top rated transit system in the world is nearly all private. Otherwise, they push for public transit, not realizing they are asking for something different.
Except that is not the definition of "public transportation" being used in this context; OP is clearly referring to transportation that the public uses to commute. They're hardly referring to its ownership.
I don’t get the bit about public transport. Do you mean it’s unhealthy because public transport is stressful?
Surely the exercise that comes with using public transport outweighs that. I feel like being able to zone out and not having to focus on driving, is more relaxing to me.
Yup, public transit over driving for me any day. I grew up in NYC which has a relatively nasty public transit system too.
If we're talking about the extremely elderly, it seems better for them to be taking public transport than driving.
The extremely elderly are staying at home or a nursing home, and occasionally and delicately transported by car.
But lots of walking in their less elderly days may partially explain their longevity.
Which doesn't track. Public transport in Japan is peaceful. I feel more relaxed on a Train in Japan than a car or Train in Canada.