Nicholas Eberstadt has an article in the latest edition of the Wilson Quarterly in which he examines what happens when a society stops sanctioning and practicing marriage as a norm and abandons childbearing. Looking at Japan’s past two and next few decades, he underlines some rather stunning statistical trends and cultural shifts:
Japan’s postwar fertility plunge has been so steep that it can be described as a virtual collapse. In 2008, barely 40 percent as many Japanese babies were born as in 1948. In fact, the country’s annual birth totals are lower today than they were a century ago—and if current projections come to pass, Japan will not have many more newborns in 2050 than it did in the 1870s.We can get a sense of the shape of things to come by comparing Japan’s current population profile with an estimate for 2040. Not even 30 years from now, more than a third of Japanese will be 65 or older. Japan is already the world’s grayest society, with a median age of almost 45 years. By 2040 its median age, to go by U.S. Census Bureau projections, will rise to an almost inconceivable 55. (By way of comparison, the median age in the retirement haven of Palm Springs, California, is currently under 52 years.) [...]
But there is more. Japan’s historically robust (if perhaps at times stifling) family relations, a pillar of society in all earlier generations, stand to be severely and perhaps decisively eroded in the coming decades. Traditional “Asian family values”—the ideals of universal marriage and parenthood—are already largely a curiosity of the past in Japan. Their decay has set in motion a variety of powerful trends which virtually ensure that the Japan of 2040 will be a country with far greater numbers of aged isolates, divorced individuals, and adults whose family lines come to an end with them.
At its heart, marriage in traditional Japan was a matter of duty, not just love.
So what, if anything, can policymakers do to reverse the decline?
Nor is there much hope that pro-natalist policies, such as “baby bonuses,” would make a significant long-term difference. They have had at best limited success in other affluent societies. Singapore has aggressively promoted a variety of pro-natalist policies for more than two decades, yet its total fertility rate in 2011 was even lower than Japan’s. Decades of worldwide evidence suggest that birth levels depend critically on desired family size rather than “birth bribes.” To the degree that values and norms frame individuals’ views about family size, it is possible that some great change in public attitudes—an ideological or religious movement, a “national awakening,” or the like—could sweep Japan and increase the desire to bear children. But nothing like this has ever occurred in an affluent open society with fertility levels as low as Japan’s.
Read more, including anecdotes about rise of “rental relatives,” e-weddings, and other human simulacra, here.
May 23rd, 2012 | 12:40 am
A rather glaring omission in this post is any mention of Japan’s population density (about 349 people per square kilometer) and the fact that even this is a practical underestimate because much of Japan’s interior is extremely rugged with few job opportunities. This results in a very high cost of housing in coastal and urban areas and, as in Singapore, people’s “family values” are not quite strong enough to want to cram a family of four into a small apartment.
Shouldn’t anyone looking at why families are so small start by actually looking at the economic situation of families in these places and understanding the concerns of the people?
Many Americans enjoy being able to purchase a detached single-family house with a 20% down-payment by their late 20s or early 30s. This undoubtedly aids in middle-class family formation in the U.S. It is important to realize just how much of a luxury this is outside the United States, though.
May 23rd, 2012 | 1:22 am
My mother was born in Japan in 1929, in a family with six children. A Mormon convert living in America, she had five children, while one sister had three sons, and her other siblings had at most two children. Among her younger sister’s three sons, all married, only one has a child.
Unlike Korea, where significant numbers of people have converted to Christianity, Japan is a stubbornly secular society in which Buddhism imported from Korea and the native animist Shinto religions are more cultural traditions rather than normative standards of belief and behavior. Only about ten percent are Christians, and a tenth of those are Mormons. The Mormons in Japan tend to have larger than average families of four or five children.
So religion can make a significant difference in family size, but converting Japanese to a more demographically sustainable religion is a tough go. It will likely decline significantly well before a higher Christian birth rate could eventually force a population expansion.
May 23rd, 2012 | 3:34 am
Note that the best long-run measure of fertility is not the birth rate but rather the total fertility rate which measures the number of children each adult woman is expected to have during her life.
On this measure, Japan does not look very aberrant at all. According to the CIA World Factbook, South Korea and Taiwan have lower fertility rates as do Greece, Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, and many other middle income European countries.
May 23rd, 2012 | 9:01 am
Mark is right.
As Spengler noted in Asia Times, “The average 30-year-old Iranian woman comes from a family of six children, but she will bear only one or two children during her lifetime. Turkey and Algeria are just behind Iran on the way down, and most of the other Muslim countries are catching up quickly. By the middle of this century, the belt of Muslim countries from Morocco to Iran will become as gray as depopulating Europe.”
It is worth remembering that the Revanchists in France urged war in 1914 because, with France’s stagnant population and Germany’s growing one, they believed that not to act then was to lose any chance of regaining the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. No doubt Tehran will watch the decline of its population of military age in something of the same spirit
May 24th, 2012 | 8:58 am
“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”
The leftists should be proud: evolution in action. It’s selecting for resistance to the anti-natalism of the modern day.
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