"Shrinking your way to ruin..."
A rather depressing look at Land of the Rising Sun as its demographic reality creates a long, dark, inescapable, ethnically homogeneous yet pretty irreversibly childless "future".
"Other problems for Japan include recent trends among its youth that have
come to regard sex as superfluous and unnecessary. One report from last
year found that 45 percent of Japanese women aged 16-24 are “not
interested in … sexual contact,” as are 25 percent of Japanese men. The
Japanese government, beginning in the 2000s, has attempted to address
the fertility issue more seriously."
I know I'm just a Jewish mother from the suburbs and I'm not very bright, but it does seem to me that it is kind of hard-well, let's say impossible to make babies if nobody is, you know GETTING NEKKID.
"Public funding is
available for in vitro fertilization and other fertility treatment.
Still, raising the fertility rate is one of the most challenging policy
endeavors possible — for any country."
Thus, Japan is looking to immigration as a "fix".
"Should the government’s plan to add an additional 200,000 immigrants per
year succeed, Japanese society will begin to look very different within
a decade, raising possible national identity issues. Currently, less
than 2 percent of Japan’s population is non-ethnically Japanese."
"Should
immigrants comprise a greater percentage of the whole, the idea of Japan
will have to change, incorporating its new residents into the fold.
That change won’t be easy, but it might be necessary to avert the
alternative scenario: a country that shrinks its way into ruin."