00:00:00 John Daub: Alright, it seems like in Japan, people just don't want to have kids, or at least that's what the western media will make it out to be like. And in many respects, they're quite right in this, that Japanese population is declining at a rate much faster than experts had expected. Just today, a news article came out that made me scratch my head and left my mouth agape, like wide open, in shock that the population had decreased that much in a year. I honestly have to say, I was not expecting that at all. So let me pull up the article. It was in Kyoto News today. And while we're discussing that, I want to talk about the reasons why. It's not actually evident to people who don't live in Japan why the population is declining, why aren't Japanese having more kids.

00:00:58 John Daub: I've lived in Tokyo now since 2004. Before that, I lived out in the countryside of Japan. I lived in Fukushima, I lived in Hiroshima, which is actually a city. I lived in Fujinomiya, which is a countryside town on the base of Mount Fuji. I've lived all over the country. I've traveled to all the prefectures multiple times. I've gotten a chance to make friends from everywhere. And I talked to a ton of people. We talk about this kind of stuff all the time. I have Japanese friends. I used to have a yakiniku club where I would meet with about 400 members, most of them Japanese. At the time, everybody was like in their 30s. Now, I went back into Facebook and took a look at a lot of the people's profiles. Now, they're in their 40s. And the majority of them don't have any kids. Some of them got married and they're just a couple that like to go out and drink and eat out, really take advantage of being single, which is something that you sometimes forget when you have kids.

00:02:02 John Daub: I am not one of these people who was causing the population crisis. We do have one son. And it's none of your business whether or not we're working on more. Although some of you seem to like to ask that. But I do want to say that I do have some clues after living here for, I guess, like 27 years now, since 1998, on why this population decrease is going on. So, I actually have a list of stuff here. The article is loading. So, I want to go over why we think this is actually this rate is declining. This is from ChatGPT. However, I'm going to go through this and fact check it or correct it based on my own experience and see whether or not it's true. Why is the birth rate falling so fast? And why are people choosing not to have children?

00:03:05 John Daub: Okay, there's the number from the news article. It's a 5.7% drop from last year. That's incredibly high. I don't think the experts thought it would drop under 700,000 for another 10 years. And here we are at 686,000. 5.7% drop from last year. I don't see this going up next year. And more people are dying, which means that the population on the whole is... I thought Japan's population was 130 million. That's kind of what it was 10 years ago. It's actually 120 million. It's dropped 10 million people in something like 10 years. Which is crazy. So, obviously we're not replacing those that are departing us because of old age. Those that were born in the 1930s and 40s. They're seemingly going despite the fact that Japan has one of the longest lifespans in the entire world. We still are not replenishing those lives with enough babies. So, let's figure out what the heck's going on here.

00:04:08 John Daub: Some of these I kind of agree with a lot stronger than others. Economic insecurity and employment challenges. This is very much true. Because a lot of people are leaving the countryside. You can see rural places are starting to decay. There's just the populations are declining all over the country. That's leading to poor infrastructure and no jobs. So, nobody wants to work out in the country. Well, there's very few jobs. And a lot of them that are there are government jobs. So, the people are coming to the cities now. Tokyo, Osaka, prefectural capitals to work. This means that there are less places for children. The houses are smaller. And this is what I experience here in Tokyo. There's less places for kids to play outside. You can't really play out in the streets. There's a lot more traffic. Parks are around, but they're kind of small. They're not as fun as out in the countryside. And it's harder to make friends because people are a little bit more cautious.

00:05:12 John Daub: This is because of the insecurities of work and life out in the countryside. People come into the cities. And when you're in the cities, you're going to have less children. Because it's just harder to have children. And also, if you're in the city, you're probably working longer hours. So, this is a challenge. Women want to be... Maybe not the same in the West. I've talked with a lot of Japanese women about this issue. I think that the West and the Me Too movement and women's... I think this is really important. But what I discovered that most women don't want to be... Their dreams are still to have a family or to have kids. And they're just not finding husbands, let's just say. Or they're waiting until too long to have kids. But work has a big deal to do with this. And the move to the cities.

00:06:02 John Daub: Now, the higher cost of living in limited space is a problem. Because people are going to those urban areas. This is absolutely true. The cost for having children in Tokyo is much higher than out in the countryside. Demanding work culture. In Japan, people don't start families unless they have a husband and a wife. You very rarely see single parents in Japan. They exist. I actually know several of them. But it's a lot rarer to have a single parent in Japan than you would in other countries. So, when you have a father and a mother, the father will be working really long hours. Sometimes this makes it hard to even make the kids. I talked to a lot of people about this. Sometimes they just don't have the time to make the kids. Husbands that go out to work... I have someone in the family who works for an advertising agency. And he's working really long hours, including on the weekends. He doesn't get back until sometimes midnight. They have one child and it's really hard for him to make the time to be a family unit. So, there's not much of a demand to have more children. Because they can't accommodate the one that they already have. Papa's not around that much. So, it's really hard for Japanese to have children when a father is working 70 to 80 hours a week at the office because of those corporate pressures.

00:07:39 John Daub: And the government's doing something about it. We'll talk a little bit about this in a second here. Gender inequality and traditional roles... I think it plays less of an issue than the West really does. But it certainly is an issue. When you ask women, like, what is your dream? A lot of them say to start a family. And that's somewhat surprising. A lot of women don't want to become career women. But it's increasing. Actually, Japan really does need to have more women in the workplace. They need more of a diversity in thought and approach, especially in a globalized world. But Japan is a more conservative and traditional culture. Japanese women that I talk to... Maybe the younger generation is different than that. They're in their 20s. But in their 30s they dream about having a family and meeting the right person. Which is the problem with number 5. And I think this is a massive one. People just aren't getting married.

00:09:00 John Daub: A lot of them don't... If you're living in the cities, there's a lot of distractions. And well, there's a lot of fun here. I've got to be honest with you. Because I'm somebody who didn't get married until I was 46. It happens. But I'm a guy. So it's a little bit different for me. I'm a guy who grew up in the 80s. But I think for Japanese women... They're getting married later. But Japanese men just aren't getting married at all. I've got friends who are in their 50s that have never been married and never want to get married. An extraordinary amount of friends. I have a female friend who's in her 50s. And she's never been married. And she loves her freedom. And I can't blame her because she's having an amazing time. She's also a business owner. So she's extraordinarily busy. But people just aren't getting married. And if you don't get married, you don't have kids in this country. And if you don't have kids, then we're seeing this. So I think it's a direct relationship between the two. This might be one of the strongest reasons why Japan is not having more kids.

00:10:14 John Daub: Urbanization has led to the concentration of population in the cities. I think we talked about that. This plays a really strong part. And government initiatives and challenges. Japanese government has implemented various measures to address... When the government gets involved, you know it's not really going to be something that's going to win the day. When the city of Tokyo... I think it's called the Futari Story. Futari (two people) Story dating app. When the government starts making a dating app, which they have, it's a little weird. I don't know if I want to be in a government database for... But there's a lot of people that do want to get married and it's just really hard. This is a social issue. To get into a serious relationship, people have standards in Japan of who they're going to marry. Sometimes fooling around is not the case. I think getting married is a really hard thing to do for singles in Tokyo. Men and women... If you go out to like Roppongi or you go out to the clubs and you do clubbing stuff, that's like a very small percentage of the Japanese population that's into this hookup culture. The 80 to 90% that don't go out. There's a lot of people who are very shy, that are living inside their own bubble that don't talk to anybody. That are not really good conversationalists because they live inside of their bubble. They can't go out on a date because they don't know what they would say. They're very uncomfortable about it.

00:13:12 John Daub: So, the government's trying to do something about it. I think it might do something. But it's hard to say at this point. But Japan's declining birth rate is really hard. What is Tokyo doing to increase the birth rate? The Futari... That's what it's called. The government-backed dating app. This four-day work week for government employees is super interesting to me. I know that that's not going to happen in the corporate culture. The government has to be a leader here. And this started last month. I have friends that are in the government. And I wonder, after taking advantage of this, the four-day work week, what's going to happen? Places like ad agencies, Dentsu, big corporations like UFJ Mitsubishi, Tokyo Bank. These are institutions that are really conservative and traditional that want to keep things the way they are. The reason why is because the bucho or the president of the company, he grew up through this system, and when he got to the top, he wants this system to continue. Having change is not easy. When you have a boss that wants to have their spending budget and want to have their low workers go out and drink with them like he had to even though he didn't like it either. So maybe in the next generation this culture will change.

00:15:25 John Daub: One of the reasons anyways and the community engagement and support programs. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on here. Shout out to Cobra Bebop. You would think that a country with so many love hotels would not have this problem. It's not the love hotels that is the problem. People... I don't want to get into it because it gets into politics and it makes Japan look bad and it's not a positive thing. But you know there's a lot of love going on, but if it's an unwanted pregnancy there's nothing to stop it. People just do that and it's a secret thing. It's a choice. It's such a complicated thing. Love hotels are an issue here. But it's usually for cheating or hooking up people who shouldn't be doing it. And also like love hotels are interesting because if you look around here and this problem is not exclusive to Japan. It is also in China and in Korea. A lot of these places here are apartment buildings. So gotta be honest with you when you live out in the countryside in particular some of the older buildings the walls are like made of paper. If you're doing it, you don't want your neighbors hearing it and if you've got kids already or you're living with your in-laws you don't want your in-laws hearing you doing it so you go to the love hotel.

00:17:50 John Daub: Love hotels have a distinct reason in Japan. Actually, if you're a traveler here and you can't find a hotel, this is where you would go. At around 8 p.m., you can stay for the night for a reasonable price. You get usually a game system like Nintendo or Switch or whatever. You get a jacuzzi and you get sometimes a rotating bed. There's all sorts of amenities that you get at a love hotel including you can call them and get a beer delivered to you as well. They're kind of neat. I've stayed with them traveling around because last minute, you can't find a hotel. That's where you would go. They call it a stay or a rest. A rest is for two to three hours or three to four hours and a stay is all night. The price is pretty competitive if you stay the rest of the night at a love hotel in Japan.

00:19:00 John Daub: All right. Let's look at the article here. It just finished loading up here. This came out today. This shocked me. Birth rates fall below 700,000 for the first time and deaths are like 1.8 million. Just put that in perspective. The number of births in Japan fell below 700,000 the first time since 2004, declining 5.7% from the previous year of 686,000. Government data showed Wednesday, highlighting continued trend of delayed marriages and childbirths. Japan's total fertility rate, the number of children a woman is estimated to rear in her lifetime also fell to a record 1.15. That's not even Tokyo. That's in the whole country down from 2.0. That's incredibly low. Both the numbers of births and fertility have decreased for nine consecutive years. The number of marriages, a key factor influencing birth trends, increased for the first time by 10,000. That's actually a positive sign. A total of 1.6 million people died. That's the highest number in post-war period. While the natural decrease deaths minus births reaching a record 919,000 marking a decline for the 18 straight years. Every year, Japan's losing a million. Japan, and increasing. Japan's birth rate has been falling since hitting a peak during the second baby boom of 1973. 2.9 million births were recorded then. The figure fell below 1 million in 2016 and below 800,000 in 2022. That is incredible. Just the population is not being replaced.

00:21:47 John Daub: One of the issues is the cost of the childbirths. Medical institutions can set their own prices for normal deliveries. The out-of-pocket payments associated with childbirths, possibly from April next year. So you don't have to pay for childbirth. If Kanae and I have another child, everything will be totally free except... One proposed approach in the policy approved Wednesday by a panel of experts involves fully covered expenses for normal deliveries under the public medical insurance program. I think I paid about $5,000 for Leo's birth out of pocket. And I think I got reimbursed for some of that from the government. Normal childbirth currently falls outside of the scope of insurance as is not regarded as a medical condition like illness or injury. Epidurals in which labor pain is reduced are expected to remain outside the coverage. This is a big problem. Kanae got an epidural and it's common in the West. It's not common in Japan. Childbirth costs in the country have largely differed from among prefectures. Tokyo is kind of expensive, but they didn't reimburse some of it. A lump sum payment of 500,000 yen from the government is currently being given for each childbirth. We paid more than that. The average cost nationwide for normal birth is 518,000 yen. If childbirth becomes qualified for public coverage, a unified price will be set nationwide, but obstetricians have expressed concerns that the move could cause financial strain for medical institutions due to reduced revenue.

00:24:02 John Daub: This is where it shocked me the most. From 120.3 million is the population of Japan. I thought it was 130. I was 10 million people off. It's just crazy because we're losing so many people. Yeah, the cost for having a child here is really cheap compared to the United States. But it's a lot more expensive than other countries. In Japan, people aren't having many kids. You'd think that they'd be using the hospitals for having more deliveries. But the thing is a lot of those hospital beds are taken up from people in the last days of their lives, not people in the beginning of their lives. And that's just a reality if you're in Japan.

00:25:03 John Daub: Now, look, there's an X factor to all of this that is not being discussed. This comes from talking to a lot of Japanese, late nights drinking over the last 20 some years that I've been here. I sat down at a local izakaya. One of the local police officers came and he sat down next to me. And he noticed I didn't have a wedding ring. And he asked me if I was married. I said, no, I'm not married. And he said, men your age are much better people when they get married. You would never say this in the West. But the first thing he said was, you know, why I wasn't married. And I was in my late 30s at the time. I said, it's not, I just haven't found the right person or maybe I'm too picky. But the societal pressures sometimes are too much and people just drop out of it. Divorce is costly. Which is why people don't want to get married. The divorce rate in Japan is going up. A lot of young people know people who've gotten divorced. So people don't want to get married because they've known so many people who got divorced.

00:27:29 John Daub: Everybody knows somebody who's been divorced, who had a bad time getting married and they're saying, don't get married. This is the X factor. Japanese know a lot more people that are divorced and it's not easy to raise kids when you do have kids because the Japanese system is so complicated. The education system is like 19th century. Forget tablets and technology, just the system, the teacher. And I taught in the industry, so I talked to the parents and I talked to the kids. A lot of them were in high school. Juku (cram school). They don't even learn in the schools that they're at, complete waste of time. In many respects, there's some fun stuff. They get to know a system that's totally from the 19th century. So the teacher teaches you, the teacher is senpai-kohai (senior-junior). Kohai doesn't say a word. You don't raise your hand. If you don't understand teacher, you don't do that in Japanese schools normally. So then what you don't learn in the school, you got to ask the person next to you who probably doesn't know the answer. Instead of asking the teacher, when you don't understand something, you ask the student next to you. And then the parents have to pay out of pocket for these cram schools called juku, which can be like several thousand dollars a year. So the kid goes after his school, after his club, he'll stay until like six or 7 p.m. It's cramming for the stuff he should have learned in school.

00:30:31 John Daub: Does that make sense? Juku is a cram school. There are businesses, multi-billion dollar companies that do this. They kind of know the curriculum and what's going to be on the tests and they have another teacher whose job it is to teach what should have been taught at the schools. But the teachers are at such a high position in society. If they're not being questioned by the students, how do the students learn critical thinking? How do they learn how to be leaders to question stuff? In the end, it works out because Japanese have the highest IQ of any other country in the world. Japanese are very smart. But you are a kid, you gotta take an exam. One exam. Think about an elementary school kid who's got to take an exam, where his whole life will be set up if he does well or doesn't do well on this one exam. You don't do well, you go to the dumb kid's school. If you do really well, you go to the smart school. They kind of will separate the not-so-smart and the smart. Oh, the kids with this color school uniform, they're not really the smart kids. They kind of didn't do well on this test. So if you go through this, do you really want to have kids and make them go through that? When you're having fun now as an adult?

00:32:33 John Daub: Parents don't want to, and if you're a parent, do you want to spend thousands of dollars to put your kid through a juku, which they should have learned in school? No. You want to go out in nice restaurants and have some fun. You don't have to tip at the restaurants. They're not as expensive as in the West. It takes off the pressure of having to tip the servers. In Japan you don't have that, so people like to go out and eat all the time. First of all, getting into the school is really hard. You get placed into it. You can go to private school. You can go to international school. That's what I'm talking about with my wife right now. Leo could go to a kindergarten next year. But we went into the hoikuen (nursery) system because he's there until 5 p.m. with his friends, and I want him to play and learn. But when you go into a Japanese school, you go into a very regimented system, which is Japanese society, which is not a bad thing. But the way that the education system is really, it's like so backwards. If they just taught the kids and allowed them to critically converse with the teacher and learn in a more natural way, then kids would be able to learn at a much higher rate and not waste time.

00:34:41 John Daub: When I talk to people who have kids that are now teenagers, even in Japan, video games is a problem. There's so many distractions now in the digital world. They can't put the tablet down. Parenting is a thing that you have to think a little bit more about than you should. Everybody knows somebody who has a kid. They know that they can't do the stuff that they have, so they don't want to have kids. So having a kid in the city should become easier and more fun. When you have a child in Japan, you have to be involved in the child's extracurricular activities and stuff. Meaning you have to become friends with the other parents. I don't want new friends that much, really. I don't want to hang out with other parents that much. And a lot of them are real petty. And you got to. You have to be involved. And then you have to buy their uniforms and do all this stuff and their associations. The social pressure to get involved is really high. Kanae feels it. You can see, like, oh, she's got to go to these functions. I don't want to go. But you got to do it. Japan's a country that... You can't just not go. Because then you get a reputation. And the reputation is more important than the money.

00:37:37 John Daub: Have you ever seen the people get arrested on the TV? They go right to the neighbors. Oh, I've conversed with him in the elevator. He seemed like a reasonable guy. But he's just a little bit off. I don't want to be one of those off people. It's YouTube's fault I feel like this. Because freaking YouTubers are putting these police body cam videos on of what's going on in the United States. And when you watch one policeman body cam footage thing, that's all your feed gets. Policeman body cam footage of bad behavior. You can't just not go. You gotta go. It's society. You cannot not be a member of society. When you have a kid, all the other kid's parents are there. And then your kid's gonna hate you because like, Dad, why don't you go? If you don't go, you become shut in.

00:39:51 John Daub: Does your wife's family accept you? Yeah. That's not a problem. I'm accepted. I mean, I didn't get married until I was 46. I'm surprised that anybody would accept me. I stopped drinking alcohol. And he likes his alcohol, so there's that. He likes to pour the beers. Alcohol consumption is a way... Nomikai (drinking party) communication. Drinking and communicating is a thing. If you stop drinking, then you stop communicating. That's also a problem that I have right now. Because I don't like to go out and drink.

00:41:12 John Daub: Look at that bird. Look at that birdie. What kind of bird is that? We're doing our part, birdie. Consuming alcohol is a waste in my opinion. But in Japan, it's a part of communication. So, just to sum this all up and put a ribbon in all of this, including this rant. I don't see Japan's birth rate turning around anytime soon. Japan does not need to have immigration coming here either. The vast majority of work can be done by bringing in people from outside. And they're doing that. From South India, they're filling in the holes in the service industry. Convenience stores, supermarkets, stocking and staffing. But the supermarkets are going to be self-run. Soon, we're going to have robot... Humanoid robots doing that. I'd say in the next 15 years, humanoid robots will be able to stack shelves and do remedial tasks like that. So Japan doesn't want to get into immigration where that could change the culture of the country too much. They don't need to. Once the population gets over this population hump and it starts to leveling out and then they're getting back to a positive. Just because the baby boomers are gone, I think that Japan will be maybe in a pretty good situation. But it's all about maintaining the culture that they have as well.

00:43:52 John Daub: Japan is not a melting pot like the United States. That's not Japan. I had this discussion with somebody... That older Japanese guy, a really deep discussion. One of his ideas was people that are coming here to move, including English teachers. When you come in here, you should take a class on societal integration. On how to integrate into Japanese society so that you understand how Japanese society works so you don't go against the grain. And make this like a really prerequisite at immigrations when you come in maybe. So that it's a really smooth transition so people get an understanding of here. Because I know the long term expats... I've lived here in Japan for 30 years. People like me. We're pretty much integrated into Japanese society. If you learn how to integrate into Japanese society, it takes away a lot of the problems because you understand why things are happening. Assimilate. So there you go. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below. I got to get going here. I got a meeting. Alright guys, this went on way too long. See you in another live stream. Matane (see you later).