Demographic Winter in Japan … and Beyond

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Demographic Winter in Japan ... and Beyond | The Stream
Dwight Longenecker

I remember when I was a kid reading an article about Japan in National Geographic. What stuck in my mind was a picture of the subway trains in Tokyo. They were so jam packed that guards on the platform were shoving people in more and more tightly so they could get the doors closed.

Japan won’t have that problem for long. CNN reports here on the fertility crisis now hitting Japan. The first half of this year they experienced the sharpest drop in birth rates on record. Births are down another 5.9%. “The decline in births is “happening faster than official projections had envisioned,” said Yasushi Mineshima, a spokesman for the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.

For a nation’s population to maintain itself the fertility rate needs to be 2.1 children per woman of child bearing age. Japan’s lowest rate was in 2005 with a rate of 1.26. Last year it was 1.42. The United States’ rate last year was 1.72. One of the lowest rates worldwide is South Korea at 0.98. In Europe, not one of the member states of the European Union has fertility rates at replacement levels.

Read more at: https://stream.org/demographic-winter-in-japan-and-beyond/