This article calls it a "quiet emergency" but even as a foreigner living in Japan there are alarm bells everywhere. 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 looked into becoming a care aid myself as I'm tired of office culture in Japan and have some experience in that field. I was shocked to see that they start at less than 10USD, and working your way up takes years, decades even.
Continuing to kick this can down the road is going to be an absolute disaster.
>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 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 higher now 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.
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 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.
I agree to some degree. There is also the case to be made that whereas in the past, young people would stay at home until they were married, and therefore assist their parents/grandparents, the rapid westernization (or "de-Japanization"?) of Japanese youth has them moving out asap into larger cities to be "free individuals" and those downstream effects on the elderly aren't anyone's fault, I guess.
This is doing a lot of cover for an airplane that has massive supply issues and mostly seems to have been invented to extract more money out of allies to serve the US military industrial complex.
An island nation under the protectorate of the US TOTALLY needs to spend over $300 billion over the needs of their people, okay sure. Makes sense I guess.
Historically those that were greedy were banished from society so the community can continue thrive. How greedy are you willing to be since you're okay with sacrificing other humans for political ploys?
>This is doing a lot of cover for an airplane that has massive supply issues
I'm not covering the damn plane in my comment. I was covering just the nation's need for self defense which is gonna cost crazy money any way you slice it if your military wants to have latest gen sci-fi jets.
>An island nation under the protectorate of the US TOTALLY needs to spend over $300 billion over the needs of their people, okay sure. Makes sense I guess.
The security guarantee that nations, like Japan in this case, receive from the US is not free of charge, it never was. It's paid in barter via purchasing US military gear like F-35s that supports the US economy and defense jobs. It's the same deal with the gulf states. Saudi Arabia and the others, accepted to trade their oil only in USD, making the USD the world reserve currency and the US the richest country in the world, and in exchange it received defense assurances form the US. That's always been the deal. Are there still people oblivious to this?
“A government audit of family registries in Japan in 2010 uncovered more than 230,000 people listed as being aged 100 or older who were unaccounted for, some having died decades previously.
The miscounting was attributed to patchy record-keeping and suspicions that some families may have tried to hide the deaths of elderly relatives in order to claim their pensions“ Thus they need to redo the audit in 2026.
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.
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.
Unlikely, as the quote about >230k misattributed people comes from the article itself. So even without taking into account that I generally expect more from the BBC, the author of this article seems to be at least aware of the fact.
Be it as it may, and even if that's an AI-generated article (which I don't think so), the point is that the article is reporting on the Japanese government:
Japanese authorities have called the trend an "existential crisis" with Prime Minister Sanae Takichi describing the decline as a "quiet emergency".
And my hope that they have taken that past mistake into account seems to have some ground, given that the 100k total number that the current figures cite is by itself well below the then-figure of 230k misattributions.
Semi-related, but I did recently wonder if China's real-estate bust might serve as a strong fertility support measure / incidental pronatalist policy.
Tier-3 and tier-4 cities supposedly saw 30-50% property value declines, setting them back more than two decades. If real estate was really holding back families, as is often stipulated, this might reverse that.
Otoh, rural Japan has lots of cheap or even free real estate but it doesn't seem to support fertility rates at all.
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.
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.
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.
We have travelled for about a month in Japan last year. They work under constant stress, lots of commute on public transit. I also did not feel their food was that healthy, lots of fried food and sweets. But the portion is small compared to what we would normally eat in a meal.
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.
Day in day out, everyday in public transit, just sheer noise would not add any lifetime. We stayed at our Japanese friend’s house so we did have exposure to their everyday life. The point I want to make is that many things contribute to a long life, and of course Japanese people are doing most of those things right, regardless of what that might be. I remember watching a documentary about Okinawa people. One thing they mentioned was laughter.
I grew up in Germany. For the past 13 years, I've lived in the US. Oh, how I wish I could go back to the "day in day out, everyday in public transit" instead of this car hell. In Germany, just like in Japan, I didn't feel that it was noisy at all. It was clean and quiet and soothing, I could just sit there and relax.
Everyone takes public transport, across all income ranges.
As a result, public life itself is more quiet and soothing, because you are not constantly surrounded by cars, even if just sitting outside a café.
Might I personally add, it is so hard to eat healthy here in the US, compared to Germany and my experience in Japan. (And German food is not necessarily healthy. But it's much easier and cheaper to eat healthy.)
Surely the exercise that comes with using public transport outweighs that. I feel like being able to zone out and not having to focus on driving, is more relaxing to me.
I looked into becoming a care aid myself as I'm tired of office culture in Japan and have some experience in that field. I was shocked to see that they start at less than 10USD, and working your way up takes years, decades even.
Continuing to kick this can down the road is going to be an absolute disaster.
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'm torn on this issue. I think the elderly 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 higher now 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.
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 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Wealth_Transfer
An island nation under the protectorate of the US TOTALLY needs to spend over $300 billion over the needs of their people, okay sure. Makes sense I guess.
Historically those that were greedy were banished from society so the community can continue thrive. How greedy are you willing to be since you're okay with sacrificing other humans for political ploys?
I'm not covering the damn plane in my comment. I was covering just the nation's need for self defense which is gonna cost crazy money any way you slice it if your military wants to have latest gen sci-fi jets.
>An island nation under the protectorate of the US TOTALLY needs to spend over $300 billion over the needs of their people, okay sure. Makes sense I guess.
The security guarantee that nations, like Japan in this case, receive from the US is not free of charge, it never was. It's paid in barter via purchasing US military gear like F-35s that supports the US economy and defense jobs. It's the same deal with the gulf states. Saudi Arabia and the others, accepted to trade their oil only in USD, making the USD the world reserve currency and the US the richest country in the world, and in exchange it received defense assurances form the US. That's always been the deal. Are there still people oblivious to this?
That is to say, it also mean less and less younger people, as 'modernity' induces fewer marriages and fewer children.
Be it as it may, and even if that's an AI-generated article (which I don't think so), the point is that the article is reporting on the Japanese government:
And my hope that they have taken that past mistake into account seems to have some ground, given that the 100k total number that the current figures cite is by itself well below the then-figure of 230k misattributions.Tier-3 and tier-4 cities supposedly saw 30-50% property value declines, setting them back more than two decades. If real estate was really holding back families, as is often stipulated, this might reverse that.
Otoh, rural Japan has lots of cheap or even free real estate but it doesn't seem to support fertility rates at all.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZE5ml7a6rE
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.
Everyone takes public transport, across all income ranges.
As a result, public life itself is more quiet and soothing, because you are not constantly surrounded by cars, even if just sitting outside a café.
As for the family you stayed at, they must eat differently from the Japanese families I know personally. Studies agree: https://www.livescience.com/54133-japanese-diet-longer-life.... https://chns.cpc.unc.edu/resources/publications/bib/2884/
Might I personally add, it is so hard to eat healthy here in the US, compared to Germany and my experience in Japan. (And German food is not necessarily healthy. But it's much easier and cheaper to eat healthy.)