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The story
Businessman Hiroyuki (Hiroyuki Nishimura) updated his X account by the 9th, reportedly citing population growth as the “breakthrough” for rebuilding Japan’s economy, posting that “nobody would deny that increasing the population would improve Japan’s economy.” He offered no concrete policy proposals, and on 5ch the first reaction was the obvious practical question: “Okay, but how exactly do you increase it?” The discussion spread in many directions — the relationship between women’s workforce participation and the birth rate, the impact of the job market and the “employment ice age” generation, and birth rate situations in other countries — with a resigned mood standing out, as many concluded there’s no easy fix.
Thu, Sep 10, 3:36 PM
Businessman Hiroyuki Nishimura (49) updated his X (formerly Twitter) account by the 10th, laying out a “breakthrough” to rebuild Japan’s economy.
Hiroyuki posted: “There are various proposals for rebuilding Japan’s economy, and who knows if they’d actually work, but nobody would deny that ‘increasing the population would improve Japan’s economy.’”
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
It's obvious if you look at the countries with the highest birth rates.
But society looks away from that fact.
Also, if we're using South Korea's terrible birth rate as a cautionary tale, we need to avoid letting looks-obsessed culture and men-vs-women divide ideology spread.
Honestly, this is exactly it.
But nobody in real life can actually say this out loud, so no matter what low-birthrate countermeasures you design, it's hopeless.
Europe fakes its birth rate by mostly growing the kids of people with time on their hands living off subsidies.
You could say that's a division of labor between people who work and earn money, and people who don't work but have kids (i.e., reproduce the population).
Lately everyone's just in resignation mode…
Once a country matures — through access to information and such — people naturally stop having kids.
There might be a one-time bounce here or there going forward, but it won't be sustainable.
That's why every country right now is making up the shortfall with immigration.
Stop women's advancement into the workforce
Spy x Family is a good example.
Except that show basically says you need to be a super-competent elite to even have a family.
Even if it's fun, you can't have more kids without money.
We already know reality too well, manga and anime can't keep up anymore (lol) ( ・∀・)ﾆﾔﾆﾔ
Are you saying everyone should become blue-collar workers?
Yes, obviously — unless you're having immigrants do it, in which case that doesn't apply ( ・∀・)ﾆﾔﾆﾔ
isn't it the case that following short-term market logic is exactly what causes low birth rates?
Ironically, the rise in staying single combined with women entering the workforce meant men and women ended up fighting over a limited pool of jobs, which is what made the ice-age generation so miserable.
If the old-fashioned division of labor — men working and earning money, women mainly handling childbirth, childcare, and the household — had been kept up, the job market wouldn't have gotten so brutal, and the birth rate would have been higher too.
If childless people were left to die in the gutter, everyone would get serious about having kids.
The annual number of lonely/isolated deaths already exceeds suicides and traffic deaths combined.
Dying alone in the gutter, fine — if that's as far as you can live, that's as far as you live ( ・∀・)ﾆﾔﾆﾔ
They're the ones creating this whole depressed society in the first place.
Developing countries can put kids to work or sell them, so their numbers explode, but once a country becomes developed it's bound by the curse of morality.
Maybe if we legalized child labor ( ・∀・)ﾆﾔﾆﾔ
The employment ice age is exactly that.
Even back when there were plenty of highly educated kids, there weren't enough jobs, and without connections you couldn't land work that matched your education and paid accordingly — so the huge cohort of kids from the high-birth era became job-hunting refugees the moment they graduated.
A job that only pays enough to cover living costs, with no real ability to save, is basically slave labor — and today's Japan is full of exactly that: brutal jobs with slave wages, while big profitable companies still run mass layoffs.
The richer, more stable, and more mature a country gets, the more its people needlessly over-educate themselves, get prouder, and become even pickier about jobs.
each kid costs you the equivalent of 50 million yen (roughly $330,000) in debt.
How are you supposed to have more kids with that?
Universities that exist purely to land you a job are going to be the death of Japan.
Funny how nobody ever argues that companies should prioritize hiring less-educated people (high school or middle school grads).
The public itself endorses companies prioritizing highly educated hires, so nothing's going to change.
Obviously that's a non-starter in today's world on human-rights grounds, so it's just not happening.
Your only options are places like Africa, the Middle East, and Islamic countries where women's rights are restricted, or places like Israel where religious teachings drive people to have kids.
In countries and eras with population growth, kids were casually born, fed whatever, sent out to work, and made to bring money home.
Japan should go back to that.
If we can't do that, there's nothing to be done about the low birth rate.
Give up.
Can you really treat kids that way at this point?
I can't.
While paying lip service to human rights, they went way too far with the whip-cracking approach in the workplace, I guess.
Nobody believes what the government or pundits say anymore anyway.
Background and Key Points of the Debate
On the low-birthrate issue, the government has rolled out multiple measures over the years — expanded child allowances, free childcare, and more — but none have stopped the birth rate’s downward slide. Hiroyuki’s post touches on this backdrop, but without addressing concrete funding sources or policy design, prompting a widespread reaction of “hard to disagree with in the abstract, but there’s no actual plan here.” The thread split along a familiar fault line in low-birthrate debates: those who blame women’s workforce participation versus those who blame the poor job market, low wages, and the lingering damage from the employment ice age. It’s also worth noting that some countries with reportedly high birth rates owe part of that figure to immigrant inflows boosting the statistics, so simple international comparisons can be misleading about what’s really going on.
※This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Geinou/Sports Breaking News+) thread “Hiroyuki talks about a ‘breakthrough’ to rebuild Japan’s economy — ‘nobody would deny it’ — so what’s the method? ‘Let’s have more Japanese kids’.”
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