> buying 150 F35's

Your immediate neighbor is going on an imperialist streak right now, and Xi says he wants the fireworks to start in his lifetime. I don't know if F35s are the right answer for Japan, but Xi isn't that young. Get ready however you can.

Japan desperately needs some defense of its own, American is an unreliable ally and Japan has no nukes. And we’ve seen what happens to countries with no nukes.

Ultimately the problem is that Japanese people are not having enough kids. It's a huge emergency. It is recoverable, but it has to be done very soon or it will be much harder. Right now, 5.1% of the population is 25-29, prime childbearing years. If all of those people had 2.1 kids, and so did their descendants, Japan's population would stabilize reasonably well. The problem is that the 0-4 range is only 3.1%. Even if that generation has 2.1 kids, the population will be massively diminished.

If that happens, the majority of Japanese people will be retired, and the cost to provide medical care for them will be astronomical compared to the number of people that can provide that care. It's easy to say "Japan is a rich country, they can afford it." However, medical care for old people is very labor intensive. Even if the old people have "savings", this is just a claim against the labor of young people. If the young people are too worn out from caring for their parents to have their own kids, the country dies out.

The only solution I can think of is to provide massive incentives to have kids. Massive meaning something like "you get $40k per year for every kid in your house under 18", or "you get a free house when you have your first kid, and a bigger one when you have your second."

Maybe this sounds extreme, but the alternative is that young people are taxed at punitive rates in order to provide care for older people. As the situation progresses, younger people will have even less kids because they can't afford them, and eventually they won't even be able to pay for a reasonable living standard for themselves. Older people won't care and will vote themselves excellent benefits, since they would have a good majority in voting. The only option younger people would have would be to leave the country, which only forces the tax rates higher. Eventually something breaks. It's difficult to predict exactly how it would go but it's not pretty.

If Japan is to be saved though, it has to happen in the next 5-10 years or so, and the sooner the better. Once the population pyramid slides up another decade, you'd need the average couple to have 4 kids or so, and the incentives required to make that happen are not affordable, and wouldn't be agreed to democratically when the majority of the population is retired and wants the money for the remainder of their lives rather than paying for kids that would be too young to provide labor to care for them while they're alive.

>And the government buying 150 F35's is just a slap in the face when there's a massive chunk of the population that is, very quickly, going to need extra care.

I'm torn on this issue. I think the elderly and people in general should get a decent life, but on the opposite side we have Europe that's investing massively more in making its boomers richer and more comfortable than anyone in human history has ever been(average pension in France is now higher than the average salary), rather than investing that money in ensuring opportunities and prosperity of future generations, who are facing economic stagnation/degrowth and are forced to foot the bill for this elderly spending, with the guarantee the pyramid scheme they're funding will fail them when their turn comes to benefit from it.

So perhaps Japan sees the defense capability those 150 F-35's bring to its future national security more valuable than keeping the elderly alive for a few more years.

Yeah, it sounds harsh when you look at people like that, but taking care of people takes resources(money), and money is finite, so all these decisions are a game theory trolley problem, where you have to choose whose lives a country should prioritize the most: the past generations, or the future generations.

Historically in the history of nations would be willing to sacrifice the elderly to prioritize the survival and growth of its future generations, that was the social contract of the tribe, that is until the western boomers came and decided they deserve to fuck the future of their nation if they can get wealthier and feel good till the end.

I'm not saying there's one correct solution here, because I don't have it. I'm saying tough decisions have to be made from which there will be winners and losers, so a nation should choose the winners carefully, if it wishes to have a future.

From the article. >While immigration has risen in previous years, foreigners only make up around 3% of the population and opposition to accepting more has grown.

That 10 USD isn't for you , it's for an immigrant from a less affluent country. The Philippines for one. Although Japan also has a significant South Asian population.

The tradition is you work a horrible job, but your kids get to grow up in a rich country with much better opportunities.

Japan doesn't want immigrants though. They can fix there demographic crisis in a single year by opening immigration up.

As for defense spending. The only issue is its not homegrown tech. Looks like Mitsubishi is actually working on a 6th gen fighter though.

The socialized cost of protecting your castle is massive. It makes for a very popular and very lazy target for this kind of “think of the children” (or centenarians) style rhetoric.

Something I keep in mind when reading these kinds of opinions is that when war breaks out and moves through a region (think Ukraine), the elderly are common among those who cannot flee.

> very quickly, going to need extra care.

they don't "need" extra care, and at 100 years old, should be pretty content with concepts of dying without intervention.

What is with the obsession in the world today about those on deaths door taking precedent over those who live today?

investing in senior people is not good ROI but at the same time they are the ones who vote the most...

What does buying one hundred and fifty F35 aircraft have to do with not being able care for your parents / grandparents?

Why do people think The Government™ is able to, should, or can, solve everyone’s problems?

The Government™ probably can solve defence.

It probably can’t solve your lack of desire to do the right thing and look after your aging parents.

I head similar stories. Also from Italy. Another aspect is that many 100+ year old have questionable birth certificates, as in the record of the birthday might be guessed. Different times back then.

That’s all true, but if you walk around “old people neighbourhoods” even within Tokyo, you’ll realize there are A LOT OF old people. Maybe it’s much more urbanized, and older people are more likely to still go out for groceries and stuff here. But even on the ground it feels like “yeah story tracks”.

I was also thinking about that, but that miscounting story is so old, notable, and well-known by now, that it's basically popular knowledge around the world. So I hope that the BBC, but especially also the Japanese government that the BBC was reporting on, are aware of that issue and have, by now, accounted for it.

The story is about the fact that the Japanese government is reporting these figures, and what the Japanese government has tried to do and believes that it still needs to do in response to its own figures. That it then goes on to cast doubt on the figures reflects on the Japanese government, not the BBC reporters.

The key word is gradual. Population decline in Japan may be faster than is economically manageable, depending on whose projections you read.

But that productivity goes more and more to capital instead of labor, making it much less feasible.

If it's all just fraud, why are 88% of them women? Is there any reason fraudsters would overwhelmingly claim for women?

https://theonion.com/134-year-old-man-attributes-longevity-t...

Yeah, I agree that the "Blue Zone" theory is mostly explained by bad record keeping. Okinawa is one of the poorest areas of Japan, but was deemed a Blue Zone, despite that wealth is nearly always positively correlated with longevity within similar cultures. Low and behold Okinawa had shitty record keeping and tons of incentives for relatives to commit pension fraud.

Real estate is not the only reason why folks have less children, especially in cultures where people don’t mind having less space. Kids are expensive for other reasons in china

I think high housing prices can impact people's decision about when/if they start a family, but other factors do as well. Rural Japan might be inexpensive, but raising a family there can be less attractive for a lot of other reasons.

> If real estate was really holding back families, as is often stipulated, this might reverse that.

It doesn't matter how much the property is valued if your work is somewhere else.

because there is no work in rural area, why you not asking the same question why younger people move to city at their 20s ??

It's common enough that the Japanese government has been tracking down long dead "centenarians" to root it out. Also, according to Saul Newman [1], many of the centenarians claimed for Japan actually died 80+ years ago in the war and were never recorded as dead when everyone else in their family died.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZE5ml7a6rE

> What are Japan and France doing so much better?

I think the question misunderstands the data.

Or more specifically, a big part of the answer is "not having kids." Think about the denominator.

I have two hypotheses.

First, France already had negative demographic trends during the Napoleonic era. That might help explain why Macron’s call for a “demographic rearmament” is not necessarily taboo today. France started experiencing smaller family sizes quite a long time ago, so the current demographic numbers are partly a reflection of past trends rather than the situation today. In a few years, Italy will probably face an even worse situation.

Second, in some countries, the very high number of elderly people may partly be the result of inaccurate population records. Some countries have a combination of incentives for elderly people and demographic records that were badly damaged during WWII. This may have made it relatively easy for someone to claim that they were, for example, their grandmother and receive benefits. Decades later, some of these people are supposedly over 100 years old.

There is even an Ig Nobel Prize associated with research into this phenomenon.

Smoking

One would say a leisurely life in France, but on the other hand, the Japanese are not known to take a leisurely approach to life.

It's pretty easy to follow if you know which neoliberal polity forced Japan to abandon traditionalism.

Japan is quite a bit different in that regard since they have family registries. Their issue tends to be death records.

Did you actually visit Japanese families, or is that assessment based on what you saw in convenience stores and similar? "Convenience" food and western style food has somewhat increased, but on average Japanese cuisine is very healthy.

I also agree on the stressful work part, but don't quite understand what you mean with "lots of commute on public transit". If you mean the Tokyo-style rush hour traffic where people are literally shoved into the train car, of course that's stressful. But at any other time apart from that, Japan's public transit is enormously soothing and stress-free, both because of culture and transit technology.

What exactly did you eat the entire time? tonkatsu and karaage?

there's plenty of great home style food that isn't fried.. nikujaga, gyusuji, nikudofu, etc.

Public transit there is pretty great. If anything the lack of escalators for some stations can be unmotivating to some people but on the other hand walking a lot of flights of stairs is healthy.

I don’t get the bit about public transport. Do you mean it’s unhealthy because public transport is stressful?