(no subject)

[timelets]

The Japanese can solve the COVID-19 problem

“I often got phone calls from (people) in other countries asking, ‘Do you guys have your own special medicine or something?’” Aso said at an Upper House finance committee meeting on June 4.

“I told these people, ‘Between your country and our country, mindo (the level of people) is different.’ And that made them speechless and quiet. Every time,” Aso boasted.

Mindo is a word often used by politicians and others to invoke Japanese nationalism and ethnic superiority and can refer to things like culture and social manners.
...
“We have kept the fatality rate very low, and it was done just by asking people to (minimize their infection risk). People in other countries can’t do that, even being forced,” he said.

“I guess everybody (in Japan) just took it and sweated it out. There were no fines, no violations,” he said. “I believe the Japanese should be more proud about that.”

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13432875

but they can't solve the fertility problem.

Japan’s fertility rate, or average number of children a woman is expected to give birth to in her lifetime, dropped to 1.36 in 2019, going below the 1.40 mark for the first time in eight years.

It marked the fourth consecutive year of decline, according to data released by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare on June 5.

The fertility rate for 2019 slid by 0.06 point from the figure for 2018, significantly down from the 0.01 point level of the preceding three years.

The fertility rate of 1.36 put Japan far from the target of 2.07, the level needed to maintain the population.

By prefecture, Okinawa had the highest fertility rate at 1.82, while Tokyo reported the lowest at 1.15.


http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13436216

Why is that?

Comments

[dmm]

> fertility problem

perhaps, individuals don't view this as a problem?

(not having kids does not seem to break the rules, does not seem to hurt a person, and does not seem to hurt people around that person.)

I wonder what's their incentives/taxes in that sense...

[timelets]

Hard to say. South Korea and Singapore face the same problem. One way to think about an abstract life would be to model it as a large capital investment. That is, not many people can afford to create it, so they don't even try. But once they somehow get it they spend a great effort to preserve the investment.

[dmm]

Right.

At the same time all these are very rich countries with highly restricted immigration, so if they do need to improve their population curves, then they have a lot of freedom to craft and fine-tune immigration policies (perhaps, they already do, given that their actual population curves seem to be close to being flat).

This might be why the society does not care all that much: because it has this degree of freedom, to compensate the trends via immigration...

[timelets]

They don't want foreigners to "dilute" their unique culture, which limits immigration options. The Koreans have an interesting commercial solution: importing Vietnamese women to marry their men.

[chuka_lis]

а что ж делать с рождаемостью, если это популяционная реакция на перенаселенность?

[timelets]

Общее количество населения падает, поэтому перенаселенность должна было бы перестать играть роль.

[chuka_lis]

тогда что-то другое..