The New Neo

[NOTE: This post was inspired by some comments in today’s open thread.]

The Japanese are failing to reproduce in anywhere near replacement numbers. The population is therefore skewing older, and it has a negative effect on the economy already. It’s been well-documented that this is happening. But why?

Here’s a 2017 article from The Atlantic that attempts to tackle the question:

The blame has long been put on Japan’s young people, who are accused of not having enough sex, and on women, who, the narrative goes, put their careers before thoughts of getting married and having a family.

But there’s another, simpler explanation for the country’s low birth rate, one that has implications for the United States: Japan’s birth rate may be falling because there are fewer good opportunities for young people, and especially men, in the country’s economy. In a country where men are still widely expected to be breadwinners and support families, a lack of good jobs may be creating a class of men who don’t marry and have children because they—and their potential partners—know they can’t afford to.

“The gender stuff is pretty consistent with trends around the world—men are having a harder time,” says Anne Allison, a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University…

The article goes on to say that Japan’s workforce used to have stable, lifelong jobs, but now a great many workers are what’s called “irregular”:

According to Kingston, the rise of irregular workers in Japan began in the 1990s, when the government revised labor laws to enable the wider use of temporary and contract workers hired by intermediary firms. Then, as globalization put more pressure on companies to cut costs, they increasingly relied on a temporary workforce, a trend that intensified during the Great Recession…

In a culture that places such an emphasis on men being breadwinners, this has serious implications for marriage and childbearing. Men who don’t have regular jobs are not considered desirable marriage partners; even if a couple wants to get married, and both have irregular jobs, their parents will likely oppose it…

Women seeking full-time work frequently find themselves in irregular jobs too, which also has implications for raising a family, because the hours are unpredictable and the pay is low. But it is more of an obstacle for marriage if a man doesn’t have a good job—roughly 70 percent of women quit working after they have their first child, and depend on their husband’s salary for some time.

So there’s a cultural lag between expectations based on the past, and present-day economic realities in Japan. And of course, when women work, they don’t need a husband to survive (especially if they’re living alone in those tiny apartments featured in today’s open thread).

And then there’s the situation of the nature of the “good” jobs:

Knowing that people in their 20s and 30s are desperate to get regular jobs, companies hire lots of young people and force them to work long hours for little to no overtime pay, assuming that most won’t be able to survive the harsh conditions, Konno said. Japan has long had a culture of overwork—there’s even a Japanese word, karoshi, for death by overwork—but Konno says that it has worsened since the Great Recession…

The result is that even Japan’s “good” jobs can be brutal. People who hold them may earn enough money to support families, but they often don’t have much time to date, or to do anything but work, sleep, and eat.

Of course, that was also true long ago (and even today to some extent) of the upward-striving poor in the US. Many of our ancestors worked round the clock and barely had time to see their children. But they still had children (birth control being an iffy proposition at the time), and their hope and dream was of a better life for those children.

I think the Japanese – and to a lesser extent, young people in the Western world in general – have somewhat lost that dream.

I wrote a post in 2017 on the Japanese aversion among younger generations to sex itself – that is, sex between two actual people. In it I linked to this article:

Nearly a third of Japanese people are entering their 30s without any sexual experience, according to research.

The country is facing a steep population decline as a growing number of youngsters abstain from sex and avoid romantic relationships.

So it’s certainly not just reluctance to marry. In the article’s interviews with young Japanese, some men said they fear rejection if they ask a woman for a date, and a woman cited the ready availability of porn that some men substitute for the risks (emotional and otherwise) inherent in sex between two people.

Whatever it is – and I think the phenomenon is multiply-determined and hardly limited to Japan, although Japan may be the canary in the reproductive coalmines – it is an ominous sign.