There are consequences to deciding that reproduction is unneeded. This country, by deciding that children did not matter in 1973, wiped out a whole generation of kids that would have ended up doing the jobs that increasingly done by illegal immigrants, and made blacks a shrinking minority.
Yokosuka, Japan – Ever since her elderly neighbor moved a decade ago, Yoriko Haneda has done what she could to keep the empty house she left behind from becoming an eyesore. Haneda regularly trims its shrubs and clips its narrow strip of grass, maintaining its perfect view of the sea.The volunteer yard work has not extended to the house two doors down, however. That one is vacant too, and overgrown with bamboo. In fact, dozens of houses in this hillside neighborhood about an hour’s drive from Tokyo are abandoned.
“There are empty houses everywhere, places where nobody’s lived for 20 years, and more are cropping up all the time,” said Haneda, 77, complaining that thieves had broken into her neighbor’s house twice and that a typhoon had damaged the roof of the one next to it.
Despite a deeply rooted national aversion to waste, discarded homes are spreading across Japan like a blight in a garden. Long-term vacancy rates have climbed significantly higher than in the United States or Europe, and some eight million dwellings are now unoccupied, according to a government count. Nearly half of them have been forsaken completely – neither for sale nor for rent, they simply sit there, in varying states of disrepair.
These ghost homes are the most visible sign of human retreat in a country where the population peaked a half-decade ago and is forecast to fall by a third over the next 50 years. The demographic pressure has weighed on the Japanese economy, as a smaller workforce struggles to support a growing proportion of the old, and has prompted intense debate over long-term proposals to boost immigration or encourage women to have more children.
Which is worse, a declining population or replacing your culture with an alien one? We are seeing a grand experiment take place. I do not think that Japan will have any regrets.
ReplyDeleteThe ghost house problem is partly demographic, and partly due to migration. There are simply areas where people are much interested in living, and when there is any population decline at all, they go vacant. Or even population stability, as more people move into desired areas.
ReplyDeleteThere are rural areas of Europe that are going vacant, because there is not much reason to live there any more. There's no factories, no tourism, agriculture was always marginal, most young people prefer the bright lights, and the overhead for roads and utilities is high.
The decline in fertility is global. Some of it is "anti-natalist" culture, but more of it is the absence of forceful pro-natalist influences. Left to themselves, and with the ability to choose, most people prefer fewer children, or never achieve the conditions they feel are right for parenthood, such as secure employment and a stable marriage.
Rich,
ReplyDeletethe problem of declining childbirth is caused by socialism and partly due to feminism. The much higher taxes that are required, in the attempt to fund all the desired socialist projects, makes raising children a prohibitively expensive endeavor. When both husband and wife need to work, children become a luxury, due to limited funds and time.
When women are convinced that working at home raising children is not a worthwhile life, the basis for a marriage is greatly reduced.
Couple that with the feminism driven abortion rates, and you have factors that combine to ruin any nation.
Socialism carries, within itself, the seeds of it's own destruction. We, and all the First World nations, are clearly following that formula. The big question is, can any nation reverse the process? None have, historically.