Outside a train station near Tokyo, hundreds of people cheer as Sohei Kamiya, head of the surging nationalist party Sanseito, criticizes Japan’s rapidly growing foreign population.
As opponents, separated by uniformed police and bodyguards, accuse him of racism, Kamiya shouts back, saying he is only talking common sense.
Sanseito, while still a minor party, made big gains in July’s parliamentary election, and Kamiya’s “Japanese First” platform of anti-globalism, anti-immigration and anti-liberalism is gaining broader traction ahead of a ruling party vote Saturday that will choose the likely next prime minister.
The crisis isn’t simply from a declining total population number. It’s from the demographic shape of that population. Here’s Japan’s population pyramid. As you can see, it’s not really a pyramid - it’s heavily weighted at the older end. As people continue to age that big bulge reaches retirement, and then you have more people retired than you have people still of working age. This causes a number of problems.
Yes, I’m asking you (or other people making the argument that population decline is so bad) to list them.
You’re still missing the basic point by talking about the “population decline.” The crisis is not the decline. The crisis is the age distribution.
Here’s a page discussing some of the specific problems of an inverted population pyramid, and it uses Japan as a specific example of a population facing this.
I still don’t see how that’s an issue. Just spend less money on elderly people?
I wish everyone worked in logistics for just like, a year or so. When you grasp how big and complex the systems are and how fragile they are to even small disruptions, you get immediately why demographic changes and population disruptions are incredibly scary.
A nation in Asia collapsing economically doesn’t mean “less people so less expenses” it actually creates ripple effects that can lead to millions of people starving on another continent.
One would think we’d all have a clue after COVID. The supply chain shocks reverberated for years.
I would have thought a single ship getting stuck in a canal basically bringing the world to a standstill would have woken people up, but we treated it like a funny meme 😭
Only to people like you, whose job depends on it. If a nation half way around the globe has economic troubles, I don’t think that’s going to impact me much…
Glad to know you live somewhere outside of supply chains and distribution, must be nice being entirely self-sufficient and having the ability to feed yourself if the grocery stores don’t have your tendies and pizza rolls or essential medications or antibiotics or anesthesia if you have medical problems. Must be nice knowing you don’t need to worry about fueling your vehicles or having packaging for your products or having electricity or internet.
I’m sure your entire community is also equally content and satisfied with being off-grid, and if the food stops being imported, everyone will be calm and happy.
Letting old people suffer in poverty or die of treatable illnesses even though they were promised a decent retirement seems like a bad solution to me, and if it’s happening it’s exactly the sort of thing I’d call a symptom of a “crisis.” And unlikely to go over well with the population at large.
Just let them fend for themselves. That should totally work. I’ll let my 96 year old grandma know that she’s gonna have to hold a bake sale to pay for dinner tonight.
Also, your solution is to spend less money on elderly people, while at the same time there is a growing population of elderly people.
Are you seriously this stupid?
When an overwhelming proportion of the population is elderly, an overwhelming proportion of the working age populations earnings have to will go to support them. This is measured by an economic ratio known as the dependency ratio which is going to get out of hand for countries like Japan. The strain on public finances paying for pensions and healthcare reduces quality of life for everyone in the country and depresses economic growth as young people working to support the countries elderly population and their own parents have less to invest in the wider economy.