People in Japan aren't having enough sex, so they're not having enough kids, and so the country is set up for a demographic time bomb.
According to demographer Keisuke Nakashima, associate professor at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies and senior associate at the Global Aging Institute, it's going to require some pretty massive social changes.
"I believe the Japanese society as a whole has not adopted to the new reality," he tells Tech Insider in an email.
In a real way, Japan is shrinking. In 2015, the country had 1,008,000 births and 1,302,000 deaths. Extinction of the Japanese people could become a serious discussion point: one team of economists set up a "countdown clock" to track the seconds until the last baby is born (currently in the year 3776).
Today, over 25% of Japan's 127 million people are over 65. By 2055, it's estimated to be 40%. This will create a ton of healthcare costs. Not just financially, but personally — the BBC reports that 117,600 people between the ages of 15 and 29 dedicate their time to caring for a family member.
While a demographic crisis like this has many factors, Nakashima says that the primary one is Japan's extreme work culture, where employees are expected to work into the night, go out drinking with their colleagues, and potentially move across Japan or abroad to advance their careers.
"If you are single, it is difficult to find a good and right partner for marriage," Nakashima says. "If you are married, and if both husband and wife work like this, there's a slim chance to have a baby. No time or no energy left. If you want a baby, you (typically your wife) face a choice — continue to work or quit your job and have a baby. There's a trade-off here."
As we've reported on before, that trade-off presents women with a choice between pursuing a career or raising children — so the population ends up with fewer of both.
To work against that, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has declared that Japan will raise its fertility rate from 1.4 to 1.8 expected children per woman.
That's a monumental task: only Sweden and Denmark have made that kind of jump.
But simply put, Japan needs more kids if it wants to avoid going extinct.
Abe's government is doing a bunch of stuff to encourage childbirth.
The policies were outlined in a document recently released by the prime minister's office snappily titled "Urgent Policies to Realize a Society in Which All Citizens are Dynamically Engaged — Toward a Positive Cycle of Growth and Distribution."
The document says that the "declining birthrate and aging population is at the root of the obstacles in economic growth."
Then it goes on to outline steps the government will take to encourage baby-making and save the economy.
The highlights include:
• "The Government will accelerate efforts to establish work-life balance, improving practices of long working hours"
• "In order to prevent disadvantageous treatment of employees when they leave works due to pregnancy, childbirth and childcare, the Government will consider responses including legal systems."
• "the Government will extend its goal of increase in the number of children accepted [to childcare] from 400,000 to 500,000 by the end of fiscal year 2017"
• "The Government will encourage youths to get married, offering various matchmaking opportunities in local communities and reducing their housing burdens at the beginning of their married lives."
• "In order to eliminate anxieties regarding pregnancy, childbirth and childcare, the Government will improve systems, including comprehensive support centers for childcare generation, ceaselessly supporting them in each stage of from pregnancy to childcare."
To Nakashima, some of these initiatives are more reasonable than others.
The bad includes those headline-grabbing state-sponsored dating services. Sure, some people might end up finding partners and having kids with them, Nakashima says, but the dating programs are "not effective, not fiscally sustainable, and not contributing to solve the fundamental problems that today's young face."
The change really needs to happen at the top of Japan's corporate structure. But, Nakashima warns, those executives tend to be old, and they're almost always men.
"They tend to regard such efforts as additional costs, and make excuses that, in an increasingly global and competitive markets, they cannot afford to them," he says. "They do not regard them as future investments to contribute to increase productivity and maintain best human resources in their companies."
That's a huge challenge for a government: legislate a change in corporate culture. But the stakes don't get much higher.
