Japan's Demographic Crisis, An Opportunity?

[the debater]

Japan right now is not looking good demographically. The main reason is not enough families getting created and not enough babies being born. Right now they're pretty screwed. Young men don't see marriage as something important, at least not the traditional version of it, and women don't want to get married because it completely ruins their careers. So I was thinking, could Japan be ready for a new social revolution in gender roles? If we as leftists want to abolish the traditional family, Japan could possibly be a new experimental playground for establishing a new sort of family, where basically young kids would go off to a government sponsored boarding school by the age of 3-5, and be raised by the government. This would tremendously help out women in Japan, and enable them to pursue whatever careers they seek. Of course there are a lot of questions and obstacles to address, but this issue came to my mind after reading an article from the Week magazine.

[Marshal of the People]

Japan right now is not looking good demographically. The main reason is not enough families getting created and not enough babies being born. Right now they're pretty screwed. Young men don't see marriage as something important, at least not the traditional version of it, and women don't want to get married because it completely ruins their careers. So I was thinking, could Japan be ready for a new social revolution in gender roles? If we as leftists want to abolish the traditional family, Japan could possibly be a new experimental playground for establishing a new sort of family, where basically young kids would go off to a government sponsored boarding school by the age of 3-5, and be raised by the government. This would tremendously help out women in Japan, and enable them to pursue whatever careers they seek. Of course there are a lot of questions and obstacles to address, but this issue came to my mind after reading an article from the Week magazine.

Not again debater, not again!

I personally think that is absolutely crazy! What about the kids? What will the Japanese government be indoctrinating the kids with (I doubt it would be leftist friendly!)?

I the first years of a child life are the most difficult ones for parents in that one of the parents has to stay home and look after the child. At age 5 the children will be at school all day (with after-school care if necessary) so it wouldn't really be a big problem for parents. Marriage is silly I can agree on that. But the reason it is career suicide for Japanese women to have babies is because of capitalism! It isn't the fault of the child or whoever/whatever you want to blame and boarding schools won't help they will just mentally damage the children because they will rarely be able to see their parents!

[Sabot Cat]

Japan right now is not looking good demographically. The main reason is not enough families getting created and not enough babies being born. Right now they're pretty screwed. Young men don't see marriage as something important, at least not the traditional version of it, and women don't want to get married because it completely ruins their careers.

They probably will just loosen their incredibly tight immigration policy to resolve the apparent problem with demographics. Many underpaid laborers would come from neighboring nations and fill in roles that their aging population are retired from, as it seems to go in bourgeois nations. The upcoming flooding for Bangladesh in the next few decades (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4056755.stm) could see millions of such refugees possibly be invited to live as laborers in Japan, who has been traditionally lacking in their responses to population displacement in such crises.


So I was thinking, could Japan be ready for a new social revolution in gender roles? If we as leftists want to abolish the traditional family, Japan could possibly be a new experimental playground for establishing a new sort of family, where basically young kids would go off to a government sponsored boarding school by the age of 3-5, and be raised by the government.

Good luck getting those policies through the Liberal Democratic Party, who has been in power with only minor interruptions since the 1950's and is rapidly against government intervention in the economy with the support of most of the Japanese people who elect them.


This would tremendously help out women in Japan, and enable them to pursue whatever careers they seek. Of course there are a lot of questions and obstacles to address, but this issue came to my mind after reading an article from the Week magazine.

Like the United States, I believe Japan will be one of the last capitalist strongholds that may not have its own domestic revolution when that time comes. If that is not to be the case, it is for the Japanese proletariat to resolve for themselves.

[Criminalize Heterosexuality]

God I love those "demographic crisis" narratives. "The exalted Yamato race isn't fucking enought! Not enough pure-blood babies! If this keeps up we might have to let dirty foreigners in!" And it's pretty much the same wherever a moral panic is invented about The People dying out and Devious Subversives being responsible.

[Raquin]

Stealing a play from the Zionists' book and raising kids in some sort of Kibbutz system is clearly the best course of action here even though those social experiments in the Zionist Entity were abject failures and lead to incurable chronic and systematic moral, psychological, physical and even sexual, child abuse.

[Tim Cornelis]

Stealing a play from the Zionists' book and raising kids in some sort of Kibbutz system is clearly the best course of action here even though those social experiments in the Zionist Entity were abject failures and lead to incurable chronic and systematic moral, psychological, physical and even sexual, child abuse.

What are you talking about? They failed, yes, but were not abject failures. I've never heard of any such systematic moral, psychological, physical and even sexual, child abuse ever, and I've google searched it when getting into communist child rearing methods.

Psychologically and sexually there was diminished sexual attraction between children. An anecdotal perspective ascribes the failure as being due to overnight stays at the children's house, which parents, whom had been raised so, did not want their children to be there. Evidently, this needs to be corrected in future collective education and child rearing but is hardly an "abject failure."

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

Good luck getting those policies through the Liberal Democratic Party, who has been in power with only minor interruptions since the 1950's and is rapidly against government intervention in the economy with the support of most of the Japanese people who elect them.

This is not entirely true. There are some similarities with the U.S. here - the LDP relies on a pandering amongst other things to farmers (industrial scale and smaller) through rather generous subsidies. However, the LDP is a pragmatic machine with no clear unifying ideology, as evidenced by its Gaullian policies in the post-war period, with extensive state intervention and dirigisme.

Like in most Western nations, the LDP adopted during the late 70's and 80's a neo-liberal course (Nixon administration demanded liberalised trade relations, thus the gradual abolition of the strong protectionist policies during the immediate post-war era as well), as the economy became regarded as more "mature". When necessary, as is common-place, occasional pandering to nationalism whenever the political support wavers, as much as necessary.

Japanese union movements have at times been quite strong yet the repressive apparatus has always effectively kept this in check. There is a lot of indifference towards politics in the younger generations, though I expect that the continuing economic stagnation will result in growing economic disaffection - however, sadly, likely to be channelled in the direction of more nationalism than anything else.

Much as in West Germany, there was in the post-war era not a thorough purge of officials associated with the previous regime, functionaries often (with a few exceptions that were made examples of) were allowed to stay to allow efficient administration of the American occupation government. This provided a sort of historical continuity that feeds some nationalist circles.

[natekerills]

The only problem with this opportunity is that only people who can speak Japanese can enter their country.