Saturday, March 05, 2005

Japan's Declining Population

Fire of Liberty

A few posts ago, I indicated that I was a watcher of population statistics. Well here's a interesting article on Japan's slowly declining population that I found in The Washington Post. Based on the article, several of Japan's rural communities have begun closing down their elementary and middle schools due to the fact that there isn't enough children to fill them because of declining birthrates in a aging population. Along with closing down schools, a considerable amount of these towns are merging with nearby towns because they don't have the people to keep them afloat. This slow decline will eventually have a significant impact on the nation as a whole. Just look here:
"A nation requires a certain scale in the population to continue its momentum, but in Japan, we are confronting a serious combination of a low birthrate and an aging nation," said Kota Murase, a deputy director at Japan's Education Ministry. "Our pension system is already being tested to its limits. And with fewer young people in society, the question is: How are we going to sustain the elderly and the nation's future? We don't have a clear answer yet."
The best solution I can offer is that the people in Japan need to start creating some families with lots of children. The young people of Japan are the solution not some government dictate or program which creates greater problems than good. Japan is experiencing the same graying population that the Europeans are dealing with today. To preserve their "nanny-state" policies and programs, these nations have had to import new people from Northern Africa and various other regions to support these aging populations thus creating bigger problems down the road with their conflict of cultures. Even the US will face such a problem with our Social Security system in 2018 when more money is going out than coming in because there's less workers to replace the retirees. Instead of a population boom we're facing a future dearth than can only be prevented by having more children, preferably in wedlock. We got to keep poverty and crime down too, a two parent family gets good results. Get to cracking you whippersnappers.

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