Japan before WWII

• high infant and child mortality
• shorter life expectancy
• many people didn’t live to old age
• there was population growth, but it was slower and much younger

So:

→ lots of children

→ many young adults

→ few elderly

**Japan after WWII
**
→ baby boom

→ improved healthcare

• better nutrition
• rising prosperity
• vaccinations
• medical technology Japan becomes world champion in life expectancy (over 80 years on average).

→ Japan gives women more freedom to study and work.
 But… the system around family, work, and care barely changes.

• women can pursue careers
• but the country still expects women to:
  • run the household
  • raise children
  • often care for in-laws
• and employers still expect:
  • extremely long working hours
  • almost no flexible schedules
  • full-time loyalty to the company
    → Conclusion: children are discouraged

Fertility collapses + a huge adult generation (from the baby boom)
From the 1970s onward, the birth rate drops dramatically due to:

• career-focused culture
• high cost of living
• marrying later
• limited childcare
• women working + conservative family structure
  → Japan falls to about 1.2 children per woman → structural population decline.

Lessons / Conclusion: Japan shows what happens when you don’t make structural changes for a long time.
 Too few workers + too many elderly = shortages of labor, money, and care.

Solutions

1. More children (slow solution)
Birth rates usually don’t fall because people don’t want kids, but because:

• housing is too expensive
• work and family are hard to combine
• childcare isn’t well organized
• there’s too little security

Countries like France and the Scandinavian nations do better:

• affordable childcare
• parental leave
• flexible work
• stable housing certainty

Result: higher birth rates than Japan, Italy, Spain, and formerly Germany.
If you want a “younger” society → invest structurally in good family life.

2. Raising the retirement age (helps a bit)
3. Robots and automation (already implemented by Japan)
4. Immigration / controlled immigration (the fastest solution)

Without immigration → extreme population decline and extreme aging.
In Europe: immigration + integration makes aging far less severe.


Japan can insist “we don’t want immigration,” “we are homogeneous,”
“we’ll manage through discipline,” but eventually this collides with simple math. If we want to preserve our way of life, we have to take demographic reality seriously, with better childcare, higher productivity, and controlled immigration.