Japan Lost 3M People in Five Years(www.nytimes.com)
27 pointsby saikatsg4 hours ago5 comments
  • Zigurdan hour ago
    Why is it a crisis for populations to decline to levels of the first half of the 20th century? The world worked just fine back then with that number of people.

    There are problems that arise from a population that contains a lot of old people, but that's a problem that fixes itself in a few decades, and balance will be restored.

    Pick one crisis: no jobs, or no people.

    • zamadatix34 minutes ago
      The age distribution is most of the problem. It doesn't help to have a lot of people who need somebody else to be working at the hospital for them. If you skip straight past looking at the period if imbalance the situation looks a lot better.
  • onlypassingthruan hour ago
    While working in Japan, I once asked my Japanese supervisor what he was doing for his next vacation. He responded that he never took a vacation and had, in fact, accrued some ridiculous amount of PTO over many years that he never intended to use. がんばって!
  • tetris112 hours ago
    Make life affordable and give time outside work, and the population crisis* will fix itself.

    Keep insisting on Draconian hours for unlivable pay, and you get what you asked for.

    * Falling population is a political problem, not a social one. It also feels like this is the system working as intended from the higher ups.

    • ecshaferan hour ago
      Why do you think that this is true? Look at the countries by hours worked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a... and there is basically no correlation between birth rates and hours worked. Countries with higher hours worked actually have higher birth rates!

      [South Korea has a high birth rate for religious groups than non-religious](https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol44/23/44-23....) no religion, 1.13; Buddhist, 1.33; Catholic, 1.16; Protestant, 1.28; and “other religion,” 1.20. This is the same country with the same problems for all groups.

    • dartharva10 minutes ago
      Had this assertion been true India wouldn't have been the most populous country on earth.
    • alephnerdan hour ago
      > Make life affordable and give time outside work

      > Keep insisting on Draconian hours for unlivable pay

      Average hours worked in Japan are comparable to the UK and significantly lower than the US, Canada, Czechia, and Israel [0], yet they all have significantly higher birth rates than Japan.

      The issue in Japan and Asia in general is cultural. Women are still expected to both hold a career and do all household chores and have 2 kids. In a lot of cases, jobs will de facto fire women if they have kids because of the cultural expectation that they will leave to have kids and become a housewife.

      Unsurprisingly, plenty of Japanese women have decided they don't want that life and have decided against marriage. On the other side of the coin, plenty of Japanese women hold off on marriage until they find a partner who can afford to be a primary earner. Unsurprisingly, this means higher educated households in Japan tend to have a higher birth rate than less educated ones [1] as they tend to be more economically stable.

      The only developed country which has an above replacement TFR is Israel (even non-religious secular Israelis have a replacement TFR), and it's culturally one of the most pro-children societies I've ever been and much more gender egalitarian than other countries.

      All conversations about TFR and birth rates on HN are from a male point of view and never actually as why women don't want kids or maybe don't want to date a number of HNers/Redditors. It's very incel-like in nature.

      [0] - https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html

      [1] - https://weekly-economist.mainichi.jp/articles/20250916/se1/0...

      • like_any_otheran hour ago
        > Average hours worked in Japan are comparable to the UK and significantly lower than the US, Canada, Czechia, and Israel

        How trustworthy is that data? It claims to count only employed people, but for Japan it works out to 6.2 hours work per day, 5 days a week. Yet we all hear stories of workers in Japan having basically no life outside of work. And when people visit Japan, they report things like everything being spotless, and trash containers and trucks being washed daily - labor intensive things. Something doesn't add up.

    • Nasrudith2 hours ago
      Except there is the awkward fact that it is the third world which has higher population growth rates and the nordics have are leaders in low birth rates.
      • no-name-here2 hours ago
        Africa has by far the highest rates, and the Nordics are far below replacement, but some of the lowest (and noticeably lower than the Nordics) are South Korea (0.7), Taiwan (0.9), and Singapore (0.9). Replacement would require ~2.1.

        https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-born-per-woman?t...

      • GroksBarnacles2 hours ago
        Consider that the world is complex and there's more than one factor. Conservatives cultures have higher birth rates, as do families with lower educational levels. Both are common in the third world. In developed countries, there's constant conversation about how people are being priced out of feeling safe or able to hit traditional milestones like having children. I myself didnt have kids in a marriage only because we couldn't afford it, and I worked around the clock hoping to soon.
      • smackeyacky2 hours ago
        Why is this fact awkward?
        • GroksBarnacles2 hours ago
          They meant awkward in this context because it seemed contrary the theory of the comment above them.
    • nine_zeros2 hours ago
      [dead]
  • glass11223 hours ago
    [dead]
  • triceratopsan hour ago
    Awfully careless if you ask me. They gotta keep better track, maybe put AirTags on some of these people. /s

    (I'm making fun of the weird phrasing of the headline. It's obviously a serious issue for the nation of Japan).