THE LAND OF THE SETTING SUN

In a recent article, Mark Steyn describes contemporary Japan as a sort-of dystopian theme park characterized by an “earnest childlike wackiness, all karaoke machines and manga cartoons and nuttily sadistic game shows.” The demographic meltdown in Japan has spawned a number of recent articles, all attempting, more-or-less unsuccessfully, to explain what has happened, why Japanese culture is dying, and what the island will look like in 2040, 2060 or 2100. I guess this is one more of those articles.

The arithmetic is inexorable. The fertility rate currently stands at about 1.39 babies per woman, a level from which no society has ever managed to recover. Since 2006, there have been more deaths than births in Japan. In 2012 there were 212,000 fewer people than there were at the end of 2011. It may be hard to see in the cities, but rural areas are depopulating rapidly. Small towns are empty, farmhouses are abandoned, and wildlife has taken over areas that once were developed.

Plummeting birthrates have also created a “gray” society, where there are more adult diapers sold than baby diapers. By 2040, the median age throughout the country will be 55 years. (The median age in the retirement community of Palm Springs, California is 52.) The collapse of Japanese society will likely occur long before that, however. Any young person capable of leaving Japan will do so rather than wait around for the nation to become a nursing home.

Europe does not face the same spectre of depopulation that Japan does, of course, because there are people in France and Belgium and Sweden and Italy who still have babies. They are the religious ones. They are the Muslims. Sweden in forty years will still have people in it, they just won't be blond and Lutheran; they will have dark hair and they will worship in mosques. The difference is immigration. Japan has none to speak of, so it is slowly emptying. The cities remain full (and the subways), and the rents are high. But the countryside is gradually returning to nature. Where once there were farms, now there are forests, and brush, and bears.

Japan is different in other ways as well. Italians are not reproducing either, but in Italy there is no sekkusa shinai shokogun, or “celibacy syndrome.” Italians (and Swedes and Spaniards and Greeks) still want to have sex. Young Japanese, however, do not. No, really. They're mostly uninterested in sex, dating, relationships, and everything connected with them. Really.

In Japan, of those under thirty years old, 30% have never dated. And of those unmarried people in the 18 – 34 demographic, 61% of men and 49% of women are not currently in any sort of romantic relationship. Even among couples of child-bearing age, 40% of marriages are categorized as “sexless” by the Japan Family Planning Association, meaning that such couples “rarely or never” have sex.

Why is this happening? Well, while Japan is racing toward extinction, French and Italians and Norwegians also are in a death spiral from lower-than-replacement-level fertility, and they will get there quick enough. (Trivia question: What is the most popular name for a boy baby in Belgium? Answer: Muhammad.) And the reason, wherever this is happening, appears to be the same. The churches are empty. Atheists do not reproduce much. And who can blame them? Without a transcendent meaning to life, what's the point?

When pollsters ask the Japanese about God, 70 – 80% of them say they do not believe in God or any religion. This is an extraordinary number, among the highest in the world, and it probably explains why the Japanese face the worst, and most rapid, demographic meltdown. There remains a tradition of Shinto and Buddhist ritual observance for funerals and weddings and the honoring of ancestors, but these are no longer religious practices, and God is not involved.

Here's a theory on the death of Japan: it's our fault.

Until, and during, World War II, the religion of almost everyone in Japan was something we now call State Shinto, under which the Emperor was a divine figure. Following the allied victory, emperor-worship was abolished. It became a crime. Religious observance in Japan declined rapidly, and apart from a very small number of Jews and Christians and Hindus, belief in the divine largely disappeared. And when the divine disappears, babies eventually stop getting born.

(The foregoing is an absurdly oversimplified description of Shinto and the kami, or “divine,” status of the Emperor, of course, but the history is true.)

There is no surer way to destroy a people than to destroy their belief in God, and that is what the U.S. and Douglas MacArthur did to the Japanese. The militaristic character of Japanese culture and religion certainly had a lot to do with starting the war in the Pacific, and we cannot blame MacArthur for crushing the institutional worship of the Emperor after that horrible, bloody conflict, but a more enlightened conqueror might have seen the wisdom in mobilizing a post-war army of Christian missionaries to replace the beliefs that were being banned. If Japanese people were Christians today, they would be in churches, they would be having babies, and they would still be here fifty years from now.

Copyright2014MichaelKubacki