this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 54 minutes ago

People now realise that kids are a lot of hard work and fucking expensive.....and that yearly skiing holidays are fun.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 47 minutes ago

Management issues... I know what can help... Introduce Agile.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I'm sure artificially lowering female med student's grades to increase drop-outs amoung women will help with the financial stability and job security needed to raise a child!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 hour ago

There's also no support for women with children there, career wise

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 hours ago (3 children)

I love Japan, but I will say it has its issues that often get overlooked. Workplace culture is horrific in Japan and it contributes to their high suicide rates. There's even a word in Japanese that specifically refers to a person dying from being overworked. I know friends who immigrated to Japan, only to regret it because they saw for themselves just how harsh the workplace culture was. Japanese people have no time for their family. Something must change or this problem is going to get worse but given it's a highly conservative culture I'm not sure it's going to see changes anytime soon.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 hour ago

Jokes on you

America has higher rates of overwork and suicide!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

Why is their workplace harsh?

Is it conservative because old people outnumber the young people and have for so long? You give a dominant demographic enough influence over time, they'll try to make the rest of society like them. Old.

Also, is it so old because Japan has a really high life expectancy? Or has that been taken into account?

[–] FalseDiamond 3 points 4 hours ago

It has two actually, karoshi and karojisatsu, death from being overworked and suicide from being overworked. Etimologically speaking, that gives you some idea of how big the problem is, kind of like the old adage about eskimos or inuits having six words for "snow".

[–] [email protected] 55 points 10 hours ago (4 children)

In the context of Capitalism, sure, Japan is in trouble.

But then again, any system that demands infinite growth within a finite system has a biological parallel… in cancer. Yes, capitalism is economic cancer.

Japan has a bright future in front of it, if it can successfully pioneer an effective degrowth system that prioritizes the lives of people over Paraiste-Class profits.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Is cancer really cancer if the rest of the body can adapt and grow faster than it? You describe capitalism as a finite system and then heavily imply that we’re near the outer boundary of that system or that all current and future resources are almost depleted.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

The fact that our planet's resources are finite is a matter of physics. Capitalism may come up with some innovation or another that adds more lifespan to it, the way that digital spaces and the financial industry have done, or it may have another global war that creates room for a new period of traditional growth at the cost of countless lives, but it will inevitably hit an insurmountable wall.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Japans GDP has been almost flat since the mid 90s, they are not following the west's """infinite""" growth. Not that I'm saying capitalism isn't part of the problem, it absolutely is, just saying it isn't the entire story.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 hours ago

everyone keeps repeating that cancer metaphor, but a plague is much more appropriate….

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 hours ago (3 children)

Outside of capitalism it is hard to function below replacement level because the young people have to take care of the elderly

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

Oh no, having to spend time with my family oh nooo /s

If rent weren't so damn high and you didn't have such a squeeze on every moment of your life to make as much money too survive, spending time and supporting each other efficiently maybe wouldn't be a problem.

Values are defined by our parents? Is it a caste system? Is extended family more or less efficient? What is the goal: sustainability, B R E E D I N G, vacations, wealth compared to others, power over others, power over ourselves? Etc....

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Young people would have time to take care of the elderly if they weren't forced to work 60+ hour weeks consistently

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

No they don't. They just have to adopt a culture of euthanasia. I don't say that to be cruel or indifferent. I assume state assisted programs are in a lot of countries' futures assuming they can stomach it. It's not something I'm advocating for. I just think the rich are cold enough to push it to try to fix the problem.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 hours ago (6 children)

As an American (or at least a non Japanese native) if my boss came up to me yelling and swearing in my face I would punch him out cold.

Actually if more Japanese did this I think things would improve at the office.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 51 minutes ago

No you wouldn't, lol. You need your job for health care.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 hours ago

Japanese are very against violence, and incidentally it's the safest first world country. And the work culture has been improving in the last decade or so - though not nearly fast enough.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 hours ago

So you'd want to go to jail for a few months (several weeks at least) over someone yelling at you?

Shit I hope you don't get married or have a girlfriend or kids.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago

yeah but then they’d end up killing all of the middle management….
yeah, it’s a good solution

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[–] anticurrent 74 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (2 children)

No one has time for family in Japan

When I watch yt videos about people leaving the workplace at 10pm, I wonder how suicide rate isn't way higher

[–] [email protected] 45 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

This. I think there's so much to love about Japan, especially the cultural leaning towards doing everything with respect, dignity, and skill.

But the megacorpos definitely won in exploiting that, and the general social pressure revolving around workplace culture there is genuinely terrifying to me.

As a US person, our corporate-brainwash culture is awful too, but I'm glad we're seeing bigger working class pushes to tell our employers "Go kick rocks. My family is more important."

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

There's a reason so much anime these days is a salaryman dying on the job and reincarnating into a fantasy world.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 13 hours ago

I think I like the premise a bit more than the show. Zom 100 is about a kid who starts a soul crushing office job only to become the happiest guy alive after the zombie apocalypse starts and he realizes he doesn’t need to go to work anymore.

[–] [email protected] 114 points 19 hours ago (23 children)

You can tell capitalism is super efficient and sustainable by how it totally collapses without fresh babies to sacrifice.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Thing is, we don't really know what's the reason for the current worldwide trend in much, much lower natality rate. We've observed in rich countries and poor countries, religious and atheist countries, capitalist and communist countries (both USSR and PRC, who have had very different economic systems), in countries with no safety nets but also in countries with large social programs, in western countries, but also in eastern countries.

The only thing I can think of these days is education level. Is it possible that education is inversely correlated with natality rates? Or maybe women in the workforce. I'm not arguing for either point, I'm just thinking about what the cause of a world-wide issue might be, because it's happening everywhere and seemingly without any clear common cause.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 minutes ago

There's plenty of research out there that shows educating women leads to reduced rates of teenage pregnancy and total number of children. Like its pretty damn solid evidence that educating women helps them make informed family planning decisions.

I think a bigger problem is increasing infertility rates and how many people need to use IVF to conceive in the first place. Something worldwide is disrupting our hormones and affecting our ability to reproduce. Even if someone had everything they needed and wanted to support a child, they might not physically be able to create one or carry a pregnancy to term.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Any system would collapse without newer generations.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Except only one of those systems depends on the exploitation of the working class, ya know, your breeding live stock. Only one of those system destroys a work life balance. Only one leaves the population with little free time and shrinking resources with which to have and raise a kid. Japan is past, and the US is passing, the tipping point. Society may deem it necessary but the potential parents recognize it as untenable.
What happens when the orphan crushing machine has no orphans?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 13 hours ago

I don't think any social/political structure would survive without a birth rate

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