More Dolls Than People: This is What Population Decline Looks Like
America’s population decline is decently bad, but it isn’t so bad that you’d notice anything drastically different in our society. We’re all still groaning with impatience when full school buses make our morning commute a good 20 minutes longer, our playgrounds are still used, and, depending on where you live, it’s not all that rare to see moms at the grocery store with kids in tow.
In short, it doesn’t yet feel like we live in a childless dystopian world. That’s not at all the case in Japan.
Japan has a bit of a population problem. Not only is its fertility rate incredibly low (at 1.37 births per woman) but last year government data revealed that for every one person born in Japan, two people died. Those kinds of numbers are a problem for social flourishing, and it’s starting to show.
The New York Post reported that in Ichinono, a rural town near Nachikatsuura, the remaining residents (numbering less than 60 in total) have taken to setting up life-sized stuffed mannequins to create the illusion of a bustling society. One resident told AFP that “we’re probably outnumbered by puppets.”
Part of the problem seems to be that parents encouraged their children to pursue colleges in bigger cities, and their children never moved back. That, compounded by the population problem, has created a dystopian atmosphere where mannequins remind elderly civilians of what could have been. It’s not all bad news though. Ichinono has one child remaining, a 2-year-old boy with, one imagines, a lot of doting grandparents.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the East China Sea, Xi Jinping’s Communist government is doing its best to avoid the fate of Ichinono after years of advocating for its famous one-child policy. China’s fertility rate is just barely better than Japan’s, coming in at 1.44, its kindergartens are rapidly shrinking, and its population is continuing to age.
So, to avoid the ticking population time bomb, the Chinese government is doing the only thing it knows how to do when it wants something from its citizens. It’s harassing them.
In one social media post, a Chinese woman with two children complained that a government employee had called her to ask when she planned on conceiving a third child and suggested that her mother-in-law or her mother could step in to help with childcare.
Another woman interviewed by the New York Times shared that she had been given free prenatal vitamins when she and her husband registered their marriage. Government officials later called to check if she had taken them, and called yet again once she had gotten pregnant to check up on her. She drew the line when they showed up at her house to take a picture of her newborn child for their files.
“We’re not like people born in the 1970s or ’80s. Everyone knows that people born after the ’90s generally don’t want kids,” Yang told the New York Times. “Whether you want to have children is a very private issue.”
Lest you think this is only an issue on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, it’s worth noting that fertility rates in the United States have been falling for a while now (last year was a record low for us). We aren’t feeling it quite yet because our population hasn’t really started to decline. That hasn’t stopped the White House from releasing a document pointing out the obvious: a declining birth rate will ultimately hurt the American economy and our standard of living.
The root cause of the issue seems to be universal. Chinese, Japanese, European, and American women are interested in advancing their careers, something that is difficult to do when you’re having kids. Our global culture is afflicted, in the words of Pope Francis back in May, with an attitude of “selfishness, consumerism and individualism, which make people satiated, lonely and unhappy.”
That’s an attitude we’ll need to fix if we’re going to avoid Ichinono’s fate.
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