Last time I talked about the international coverage of the impending “extinction” of the Japanese people, which will happen a millennium from now according to current projections. Making predictions about a time that far into the future is silly, of course, but it is interesting to explore the reasons Japan’s birth rate went from 2.75 children per female in the 1950s to just 1.38 today. Some of the more obvious reasons include economic ones (it costs a small fortune to raise a child in Japan) plus the trend of people leaving more rural prefectures and moving to cities, where the scarcity of parks and wide-open spaces can turn off many would-be parents. There’s an inverse relationship between education of women and a country’s birth rate, and it’s interesting to compare modern Japan with Afghanistan, where education of girls is seriously lacking and the birth rate is 6.5 babies per female. Stress and other factors lead Japanese couples to engage in the horizontal mattress dance less often than any other nation in the world, driving a trend in “sexless” marriages.
There are many reasons for Japan’s falling birth rate.
