Japan is running out of people

[onebyone]

Japan’s population decreased by nearly 1 million people over the past five years according to the country’s latest census, the first recorded population decline for the country since the 1920s.

Officials expect deaths to continue to outnumber births for the foreseeable future.

The largest drop, unsurprisingly, was in Fukushima, site of the 2011 nuclear disaster.

At current rates, by 2060, Japan’s population will be one-third smaller than it is now and 40 percent of its citizens will be older than 65, a grim prospect for an already struggling economy.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government has introduced some policies aimed at increasing the birth rate, including tax incentives for having children and increasing access to child care.

Measures to address the hostility toward working mothers in many Japanese companies would also help, and the country is making some progress on that front. But the government is probably too late to stop the decline altogether.

One obvious solution to Japan’s population problem would be foreign immigration, but Abehas shown little interest in loosening the country’s notoriously strict immigration laws.

Foreigners account for only 2 percent of Japan’s population, which includes many ethnic Koreans who have lived in the country for generations.

While the government is considering letting in more foreigners, Abe has spoken with pride of Japan being an “extremely homogenous” country, so the kind of influx that might stabilize the population is unlikely.

Fertility rates are falling in virtually every developed country. Without immigration, the U.S. population would also be declining.

As people get richer and more educated, they tend to have fewer children. As life expectancies increase, populations get grayer.

Thanks to a number of factors including density, education, the high cost of living, and a particularly irreligious population, this is happening faster in Japan than in most places.

But dubious trend stories aside, there’s nothing that weird about Japan’s situation. It’s not an outlier; it’s a preview.
Japan is running out of people - Business Insider

 

[onebyone]

Japan's low birthrate is causing a vacant-property crisis

• Matt Stroud, CityLab

• Jan. 2, 2016, 7:21 PM
• 11,380
• 
  
• 
  Any way you measure them, Japan’s population figures are dire.
  
  The country is expected to lose more than one-third of its population by 2060, thanks largely to low birth rates and an aging populace.
  
  In 2012, according to Japan’s Statistical Yearbook, the country’sannual death-to-population ratiopassed one percent.
  
  This isn’t astoundingly high: the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook ranks Japan’s death rate (the deaths during a year per 1,000 population) at 54th out of 225 countries.
  
  But the trouble comes when you factor in the fertility rate: Japan currently has the third-lowest recorded birth rate in the world.
  
  All of this has already had a profound effect on Japanese housing. Between the mid-1990s and 2013, the number of vacant or abandoned properties in Japan doubled.
  
  These neglected structures now make up an estimated 13.5 percent of the country’s housing stock. The phenomenon of abandoned Japanese homes is so widespread that people have begun writing poetry about it.
  
  When the Tokyo Association of Housing and Land Investigators put out a call for satirical haikus on the topic, it received 4,000 responses. “Where we were born, vacant houses gather, for legacy’s sake,”read one. "Watch out! Earthquakes and Thunder! Burning Vacant Homes,” read another.
  
  It’s as though the entire country is facing a U.S. Rust Belt-style population problem. “Tokyo could end up being surrounded by Detroits,” one Japanese real estate expert told The New York Times in August. And like some Rust Belt cities, Japan has taken to dealing with it through legislation.
  
  Passed in May 2015, Japan’s newest Vacant Housing Law is similar to moves in some shrinking U.S. cities that give government more latitude to enforce code violations and tear down structures that have become blighted and potentially dangerous.
  
  But the Japanese law’s real innovation, according to Peter Manda, a New Jersey-based fraud investigator with EY (formerly Ernst & Young) who’s working toward an advanced international law degree at Boston University, is its focus on creating a database that not only identifies vacant properties and their owners, but also helps bring those properties into public use.
  
  In the current edition of Cityscape, the journal of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Manda analyzes Japan’s Vacant Housing Law with an eye toward the U.S. experience.
  
  
  
  Flickr/Andrea SchafferJapan has some pretty inventive ways of dealing with vacant property.
  
  “They’re not just going in and razing the properties,” Manda tells CityLab. “They’re also turning these properties into municipal buildings and affordable housing.”
  
  Here’s how it works: In Japan, local municipalities are authorized by the country’s national government to create councils that keep track of properties showing signs of possible abandonment. Those councils then report vacant properties to national tax authorities, who hand over ownership data and log the information into a national database.
  
  That database tracks where the vacant properties are located, and whether any progress has been made to remediate. If no progress is made after the councils notify owners what needs to be done, fines are levied.
  
  If the owners are unable to remediate—or they can’t be located at all—the councils then have the right to demolish or refurbish the properties as long as that use is approved by the national government for, as Manda puts it, “cultural, social, or governmental purposes that are predefined in an approved smart growth-oriented response plan.” In addition to fines, a national tax funds the whole process.
  
  It’s too early to say whether Japan’s program is a success—or whether municipalities might face accusations of unfair practices in targeting certain properties—but the model is sound, Manda says.
  
  The national scope is what makes the program novel and, if the U.S. is smart, it will follow Japan’s lead. As Manda sees it, Japan’s vacant housing problem foreshadows what the U.S. could soon face.
  
  
  
  U.S. Census Bureau
  
  
  
  The Census Bureau projects that the United States’ overall population will grow by about 31 percent over the next 45 years.
  
  But dig into those projections and you'll find that the increase hinges in large part on immigration: nearly 15 percent of the people contributing to the increase from 2010 to 2060 are expected to be foreign-born. The Pew Charitable Trusts puts that number even higher.
  
  If the nativist rhetoric of the Republican presidential campaign extends beyond the primaries, the Census bureau and Pew might want to reconsider their estimates.
  
  “Given the current political climate,” Manda writes, “it could well be that decision-makers will prefer a more restrictive immigration policy.”
  
  According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, vacant and abandoned structures currently make up about 8 percent of U.S. properties.
  
  But as Baby Boomers—who are about 80 million of the country’s 319 million people—come to the ends of their lives in increasing numbers, the U.S. death-to-population ratio could easily match the level Japan reached in 2012.
  
  Figures like these should encourage U.S. stakeholders to think more seriously about how they’re planning for a post-Baby Boom future, Manda says.
  
  
  
  R26B / flickrVacant property will be an issue as long as Japan's birthrate stays low.
  
  “If you’re going to be a non-profit and say, ‘Oh, wow, we could get grant money to build a senior home,’ and then build a senior home, what happens in 20 years when there aren’t any more seniors in the community because all of them have died off?
  
  What are you going to do with that senior home?” he asks. “These are the kinds of things we need to start thinking more about. There are communities that design buildings such that they can convert homes to other uses at some point—that needs to go into the whole planning process a little bit better.”
  
  In his Cityscape article, Manda puts the goals for U.S. housing policy into context.
  
  “A response to the shifting demographics of a rapidly expanding elderly population and contracting younger population that includes planned, focused, and proactive policies must nevertheless include a ‘what then?’ calculus,” he writes.
  
  “By including the ‘and after death?’ question into housing policy, policymakers can make the tough optimization choices necessary to spare the next generation the costs of dealing with a national blight problem similar to the one currently experienced in Japan.”
  Japan's has a vacant-property crisis - Business Insider

 

[haidian]

The world is running out of Japanese people
https://qz.com/1295721/the-japanese-population-is-shrinking-faster-than-every-other-big-country/

At current birth rates, the Japanese population will disappear by 2500
http://bigthink.com/brandon-weber/t...-crashing-faster-than-any-other-country-why-2

 

[大汉奸柳传志]

modernization is a curse, Japan needs Islam.

 

[Asimzranger]

they have lots of love hotels so most of japanese men use those , less people want marriage or kids.

 

[PAKISTANFOREVER]

Japan’s population decreased by nearly 1 million people over the past five years according to the country’s latest census, the first recorded population decline for the country since the 1920s.

Officials expect deaths to continue to outnumber births for the foreseeable future.

The largest drop, unsurprisingly, was in Fukushima, site of the 2011 nuclear disaster.

At current rates, by 2060, Japan’s population will be one-third smaller than it is now and 40 percent of its citizens will be older than 65, a grim prospect for an already struggling economy.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government has introduced some policies aimed at increasing the birth rate, including tax incentives for having children and increasing access to child care.

Measures to address the hostility toward working mothers in many Japanese companies would also help, and the country is making some progress on that front. But the government is probably too late to stop the decline altogether.

One obvious solution to Japan’s population problem would be foreign immigration, but Abehas shown little interest in loosening the country’s notoriously strict immigration laws.

Foreigners account for only 2 percent of Japan’s population, which includes many ethnic Koreans who have lived in the country for generations.

While the government is considering letting in more foreigners, Abe has spoken with pride of Japan being an “extremely homogenous” country, so the kind of influx that might stabilize the population is unlikely.

Fertility rates are falling in virtually every developed country. Without immigration, the U.S. population would also be declining.

As people get richer and more educated, they tend to have fewer children. As life expectancies increase, populations get grayer.

Thanks to a number of factors including density, education, the high cost of living, and a particularly irreligious population, this is happening faster in Japan than in most places.

But dubious trend stories aside, there’s nothing that weird about Japan’s situation. It’s not an outlier; it’s a preview.
Japan is running out of people - Business Insider

Hopefully the Japanese will turn it around. They are a highly accomplished, very intelligent and advanced people and civilisation. Want more of these types of people on earth, not less.

 

[haidian]

With the decline of the population, so goes with its economy, a very gloomy future.

Japan economy shrinks in 1st quarter
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 8, 2018 at 14:25 JST
http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201806080033.html

 

[Jlaw]

You guys are all doom and gloom. When China becomes fully modernize, Japanese will accept Chinese like in ancient times stabilizing their population again.

 

[Offshore]

You guys are all doom and gloom. When China becomes fully modernize, Japanese will accept Chinese like in ancient times stabilizing their population again.

no shit, better ship Refugee from african to japan.. in 20 years.. they will have baby boom

 

[haidian]

They are a highly accomplished, very intelligent and advanced people and civilisation..

Their civilization is mainly Chinese civilization.

 

[Beast]

The decline is still slow. I dont see a big deal. Advance countries all need to deal with low birth rate.

 

[Cybernetics]

It is hard to maintain Japan's peak population density with its domestic resources and its technology edge is slipping due to regional competitors.

Eventually Japan would recover like Ireland but it would take some time. Future population would likely stabilise at a lower number. Housing prices in Tokyo is becoming more affordable than before. Population decline is not the end of the world. It had happened throughout history.

Most of the foreign residents in Japan comes from neighbouring nations. The ones from Brazil are Japanese Brazilians (1.6 million).

The host of this show 阿部力/Tsuyoshi Abe (Actor) is of mixed Chinese and Japanese heritage (Japanese grandmother), he was born in Heilongjiang.

The lady is a Chinese in Japan working as a TV personality.

This 71 year old elderly Japanese man is a specialist in organic agriculture living in China.

 

[rott]

As long as they don't run out of ladies I am fine with it.

 

[fitpOsitive]

Hopefully the Japanese will turn it around. They are a highly accomplished, very intelligent and advanced people and civilisation. Want more of these types of people on earth, not less.

Well, its irony that you can only deal with situations like this when you are less a civilised, less accomplished and lesser developed.
But yes, Islam can save them, as one of the members mocked.

 

[PAKISTANFOREVER]

Well, its irony that you can only deal with situations like this when you are less a civilised, less accomplished and lesser developed.
But yes, Islam can save them, as one of the members mocked.

Planet Earth needs more intelligent, decent and civilised people. We need to have less barbaric, low IQ savages who are unfortunately increasing in number.

Their civilization is mainly Chinese civilization.

Exactly. The Chinese are also a highly accomplished, super intelligent and civilised society and peoples.

no shit, better ship Refugee from african to japan.. in 20 years.. they will have baby boom

But then Japan will turn into a Sub-Saharan hell hole with ALL the associated problems with those of that ilk. Japan would cease to be an advanced, high IQ society. In fact they will be on par with cavemen from 50,000 years ago. What you are suggesting is a good way to destroy advanced, highly civilised high IQ societies and replace it with the lowest form of humanity.