Deep Thought has an interesting piece on the fall in Japanese birth rates. The birthrate in Japan has fallen from 1.29 in 2004 to 1.25 in 2005, the last year available for statistics.
Why is this important? There's been a lot written on overpopulation and why we shouldn't have so many kids (this was one of the arguments presented by the Pandagonistas for why abortion is good), including that we're just using up too many natural resources. Now, we're seeing a great number of stories on the consequences of low birth rates. Essentially, a culture, country, or population can't sustain itself if they don't reproduce enough children. In industrialized countries, low birth rates are leading to questions about the sustainability of the welfare state. In our own country, the annual debate about social security sustainability revolve around the dropping number of workers available.
But Deep Thought's post is more philosophical than that. Why are the Japanese not reproducing? Here's his explanation:
So what is it that is taking the once-vibrant Japanese culture from being aggressively expansionist to apathetically self-destructive in the course of a mere 60 years? I have a vague inkling of a theory. As I mentioned earlier, religion is good for you. Religious societies tend to be happier, more fully employed, higher earning, and have more children. They also have lower rates of depression and suicide. Japan is perhaps the most secular Western society on Earth, removing the positive effects of religion from its population. Also, it appears that there is some correlation between suicides and projected population growth. This could mean that despair means fewer children, fewer children in a society lead to suicides, or that both are symptoms of something else. In any case, the positive effects of religion are absent from Japan. At the same time, Japan’s embrace of what they perceived as Western values after WWII led to it becoming in some ways the epitome of Western materialist and postmaterialist aims.
I believe that Japan is showing us nothing more, and nothing less, than the ultimate result of a materialist, secular nation. The rejection of religion and mysticism, the detachment of morals and values from absolute claims, and the embrace of the government as surrogate family are all seen in Japan. The resulting society is the goal of any number of Western thinkers.
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