That only works for 1 or 2 generations, when the immigrants' descendants find out what the pre-existing citizenry already has found out: that it's too expensive and difficult to have children, particularly when you're overworked all the time.
Plus, immigrants are usually only brought in for jobs that are shittier, harder, lower-paying, and with fewer benefits than the current population of native born citizens already have.
I'm a children of immigrants in the USA who is childless (hell, most of my cousins are too) and I live around immigrants of every nationality, and most either want to wait until 30 to have kids (and generally only like 1 kid at that) or want to have no kids.
It's like that in a lot of western nations with birthrate problems. It doesn't take long for new people to start acting like the old people if the conditions are bad enough, and they are.
I don’t know if this will change your mind, but I think people exaggerate how difficult it is to have a kid. It’s pretty hard for the first year, but it gets easier. I had my son when I was 19. I haven’t thought about having another until recently, my son is 9 now, so it’s been 10 years or so. It’s a pretty big sacrifice at first but it does get easier with time… Then they got school and after school activities. I spend a lot of time with my son and enjoy spending time with him, so it’s not like it’s a drain. I also managed to get a solid career without a college degree by wit and effort. People who weren’t going to accomplish anything with their lives love to blame their children for their own shortcomings. I’m not saying it wasn’t without sacrifice, but don’t listen to naysayers. A child is not the end of the world.
I don’t think that people having children in their 30s is a bad thing. In fact, there’s a lot of misconceptions about when a woman should have a child, and it’s safe to have children even into your 40s. I think young women don’t want to start birthing kids in early adulthood when there isn’t a strong family support system in their life. Also, to be honest, most people are still trying to figure out so much about who they are and what they want in their 20s, I’d rather see more people waiting to have kids than people having kids without a thought of how they’re going to provide
Abe’s push for native births over integration of foreigners always struck me as deeply racist. Especially knowing the background reasons why birth rates are so low.
Low salaries and culturally long working hours, plus the cultural tradition for women to abandon their jobs to take care of their children (which they can’t afford to do in this economy, so most just postpone child rearing)
Technically the work week is the same, not factoring in commutes. Folks who work in Tokyo often live in neighboring cities like Saitama and commute in.
There’s typically a lot of unpaid overtime though. There is the concept of “black companies” that force employees to work up to 100 hours a week. To some degree the government has been trying to crack down on it, and has met with some success, especially with the bigger international. My company is the Japanese branch of a US company, so we are a little better than most, but some of that still happens. I probably work about 45-50 hours a week on the clock on average, plus maybe 2-3 off the clock. I don’t live or work in Tokyo anymore, so my commute is fairly insignificant.
Thankfully the “you have to go out drinking with all of your coworkers after work” thing has mostly fallen by the wayside. Those events still happen, but it is way more acceptable to just…not go.
Source: I have worked in Japan my entire adult life
A few years back I was working on Memorial Day getting paid my holiday pay (8 hours pay to stay home) plus time and a half for working on a day I’d normally not.
I take bathroom breaks whenever I like it at work. School is the only place where you have to have o
permission from an authority figure to relieve yourself. Abolish kid prisons.
Fuck that. You gotta go you gotta go. I worked in a warehouse that tried that, too. No one stopped me from going anytime. They’d grumble about it, but I’d just ask them where they’ve been after they use the bathroom.
Stories change pretty quick when you turn it on them.
Also, jobs that try to pull that stuff aren’t worth it.
Yeah, but there’s this big fucking LCD screen that shows my specific work station’s productivity so I can be tracked second by second and part by part and it’s displayed for everyone to see. My brain worms tell me I have to have green numbers or they’ll kill me (i.e. fire me)
It’s probably just catastrophizing. My brain jumps to the worst possible conclusion - if I get fired I won’t be able to find a job that pays well enough to keep my trailer and then I’ll be homeless, etc. And then I’m a sobbing wreck as I work myself into a panic attack, as one does.
His story is amazing. Radicalized by the equivalent of Japan’s alt right, then when he realized that’s who exactly grifted his mother to give away the family wealth, turned his attention to that.
So, he fell for the alt-right bullshit, then later realized they were the grifters and scammers, not the filthy gaijin? That culminating in the assassination of Shinzo Abe sounds straight out of a revenge movie
I can’t find the article that mentioned his shift in political views, but he was a hardcore alt-right type before realizing that’s who swindled his mother.
One thing that does change depending on when the article was written is Abe’s connection with the church and the church’s connections to the Japanese and South Korean governments. Police withheld certain details until after the elections and approval ratings for the party dropped after. Generally, people aren’t too happy with that and there was even push back about the government paying for Abe’s funeral.
“Hey, baby, the prime minister is telling us to have kids. That’s got me pretty horny. No, he’s not making any significant changes to help take the edge off that massive expense and responsibility, but who cares? I’ll put his speech on loop and turn it up. Let’s fuck.”
Japan is trying to change things. I think it’s just really far behind. While I was there, I remember government run/funded dating programs. The government names and shames companies that overwork their employees. But their definition of overwork is probably well beyond ours. The one-employer-for-life mentality is slowly eroding but it’s slow.
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