Japan's Declining Population...

[Admiral Valdemar]

And that, Timmy, is where cyborgs come from.

[FSTargetDrone]

One solution I almost never see brought up is finding a way to keep older people healthy and in the work force. In the US there's the meme of retire at 65, but when that began I think the average lifespan was somewhere around 60-65 so really most, if they made it that far, only had a couple years in retirement. People healthy enough to work should be working, and if we can keep people that healthy into their 80's they should remain in the work force, which will solve at least some of the problems.

My father is 63, healthy, exercises regularly, keeps himself fit, and is not planning to retire anytime soon. He owns a small insurance brokerage company, so there's no issue of his being persuaded to leave at 65 by someone else. He wouldn't know what to do with himself if he wasn't working.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Perhaps they should have done the smart thing and not taken what politicians say at face value and actually crunched some numbers. Even with the low birth rate and death rate in the West, the number of people approaching retirement especially now the baby boomer generation is nearing such a point is going to explode. Pretty soon it will be a meagre working force supporting a massive group of older, healthier, more exuberant elderly people who feel they are entitled to live easy even if their pension schemes are collapsing around them. I've already had talks with my company's pension consultant, and I doubt I'll be retiring at 65 as they expect. More like 85.

People are living too long and not being productive in that time. The idea of retirement is quite new, whereas normally you worked until you died and that was that. Of course, in those days, everyone was essentially a farmer too and we didn't have the useless fat in society that, come a recession or worse, inevitably ends up leading to redundancies as non-essential jobs are axed.

Asian society has a habit of following what the top says at face value. Learning how not to listen to the top slavishly is actually quite a relatively new idea actually. Japan had, until the last decade, institutionalised the iron rice bowl and a lot of people didn't think of saving as companies gave lavish pensions and so forth. Then came the bursting of the bubble of the 90s and everything when down hill there after. People there are still trying to adjust to a lot of new ideas and one of them, is a lack of job security. People also have less kids when jobs aren't secure.

Further, companies are becoming more inclined to hire younger people. It's fine to talk about being productive at an old age, but it's another problem altogether when it comes to the question of whether there are jobs for old people.

[Mayabird]

You know how in other threads we talk about how humans are using too many resources and there are too damn many of us and so on and so forth? And now people are decrying a population decline? Maybe this would be a GOOD thing in the long run. Less people need less resources, and resources are going to become scarcer. Japan is a pretty resource poor place anyway, but they maintain their infrastructure, so with a smaller population (and the still-strong social duty cultural thingies going on) it could find itself being less screwed than many other places in the increasingly-near future.

Now as for the population decline, reasons why: Japan's racist. There are fourth-generation people living in slums in the cities who are basically a permanent second-class citizen group because their ancestors were Korean. For a while, Japan tried to recruit people in ethnically Japanese populations overseas to move in. Immigration while maintaining ethnic homogeneity or some crap like that. They found themselves with thousands of people who looked Japanese and had Japanese ancestry, but spoke and read only Brazilian Portuguese and generally had no idea what was going on. Didn't work too well.

Also, women are treated like shit. There's a reason why a lot of Japanese women end up marrying American men; as my mom, who is Japanese, told me when she advised me never to marry a Japanese man, Japanese men are pigs*. They generally just want women to stay at home and wash their socks and have a cold beer waiting for them when they get back from work. Raising children? Helping around the house? That's women's work! The divorce rate peaks at the retirement age, because the men still won't help out around the house, but now they have nothing to do but sit around the house and watch TV and demand that their socks get washed NOW. Japanese women realize that they could live for another twenty-five years and they don't want to put up with this crap, so they get a divorce. (The men often find themselves utterly helpless and unable to do basic things, like feed themselves microwave dinners.)

And a lot of young women, looking at their prospects for the future, decide that they would rather not get in that situation to begin with. They can work and support themselves (and if they got married, they'd probably have to quit their jobs and stay at home and wash socks). Japanese men, as a whole, just keep perpetrating their good ol' boys network and don't think that maybe they should rethink their cultural practices (like misogyny - you know there's a problem when subways consider making women-only cars because of the number of men who grope random women on the subways).

So, fact is, people are just going to have to give up on their hopes of retiring in their 60s. It's just not going to work. I just hope Japan is going to wise up and not go the way of the U.S. (because unless some miracle of people gaining functioning brains occurs, the system's just going to keep lurching along here until the entire thing collapses in a very painful mess, probably leading to the immediate death of tens of thousands of elderly people who were only surviving on some kind of pension. It's not going to be pretty.)


*ESPECIALLY ones from Osaka. She always emphasized that Osaka men are the worst. Osaka is apparently the Alabama of Japan, complete with horrid accents.

[hongi]

They generally just want women to stay at home and wash their socks and have a cold beer waiting for them when they get back from work.

They'd probably have to quit their jobs and stay at home and wash socks).

but now they have nothing to do but sit around the house and watch TV and demand that their socks get washed NOW.

You've got something against men and socks don't you?