Takehiko Kambayashi, Christian Science Monitor, September 29, 2009
After Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s debut on the international stage last week at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the premier is back home to tackle daunting tasks. One of the most intractable problems his country is facing is its falling birthrate.
Japan’s population could shrink by25 percent by 2050 if the birthrate does not increase, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.
Prime Minister Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan won an overwhelming election victory last month, breaking more than 50 years of almost uninterrupted rule by the Liberal Democratic Party. In an attempt to bring the birthrate back to a sustainable level, the new government has promised to ease the expense of raising children in this island nation.
According to government minister Mizuho Fukushima, previous administrations “have been weak on providing financial support even though they have taken steps to tackle the daycare shortage problems.” Now, Japan “is going to provide childcare support as much as it can to create a society where Japanese people can have a dream of raising children,” Bloomberg quoted him as saying.
Mr. Hatoyama has vowed to spend 16.8 trillion yen ($186 billion) to pull the country out of its economic slump in a package that includes provisions such as tuition aid and child support to make raising children easier.
Families would receive 13,000 yen ($144) a month per child under 15 in the year beginning April 2010 and 26,000 yen a month the following year if his plan is approved.
Ms. Fukushima, the leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), says monthly allowances are not enough on their own. She says that more than 30,000 children are on daycare center waiting lists so money is needed to provide more childcare. She says requiring health insurance to cover fertility treatments may also be a good idea.
{snip}
Long working hours, the rising cost of childrearing and mothers’ large responsibility for raising a child have also cut the birth rate, says Yasuko Oshima, a senior economist at Mizuho Research Institute. “Parents are also having a hard time making work and childrearing compatible.”
While Ms. Oshima welcomes the new government’s child allowances plan, she says society needs to change from a traditional approach where mothers alone bear the burden of childrearing.
Japan, she says, “needs to promote the creation of an environment conducive to not only wives but husbands working while raising a child.”
Original article
(Posted on September 30, 2009)
Comments
“Japan’s population could shrink by 25 percent by 2050 if the birthrate does not increase,”
This should actually be seen as good news by the Japanese. With a population density ten times that of the USA, Japan is overpopulated. As long as the birthrate eventually reaches a plateau; as long as they can resist the urge to import foreigners for labor; and as long as they avoid paying for or subsidizing the procreation of marginal Japanese, Japan will do just fine. In fact, the standard of living will improve with the reduced population density.
“Japan’s population could shrink by25 percent by 2050 if the birthrate does not increase, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.”
These statistics are so bogus. It wasn’t too long ago they were saying the population would half by 2050. Now it’s at 25 percent?
It will be intersting to see how Japan copes with this probelm in the next twenty years. Their retirement pension system will be strained, retirement ages may have to be increased, and there will be a conflict between those who want to allow immigration to save the economomy and those who want to maintan the homegenous ethnic makeup Japan, unless birthrates increase. In ther back of their minds the politicians over know that if they can’t increase birthrates, maintaining the traditional character of Japan may not be possible. I’ve heard that Japan has been investing heavily in robotics research, but in probably won’t be until the middle of the next century at the earliest when autonomous machines can replace human labor. What might end up happening is the Japanese allowing immigrants that are most like them culturally such as koreans and chinese to gradully come in and assimilate. However, I am no expert on asiancultures, for all i know their may be major differences between chinese and Japanese culture. I just assume the differences are no greater than between American and the various cultures of European imigrants that settled here.
Here in the U.S., we pay stupid people to have stupid babies. Worthless eaters. Go down to the bad section of your town and watch them hanging out aimlessly. Does anyone really think these welfare cases are going to grow up to be scientists or engineers?
“New prime minister wants welfare programs to offset cost of raising children.”
This option is only one of several that a nation could implement instead of importing third world poverty and crime.
Good for the Japanese. If only the white criminal elites had half as much sense.
But their chickens are coming home to roost right now, and the worst part is yet to come. They won’t be able to avoid any of it in their gated communities. That’s the GOOD NEWS.
Living in one of the most underpopulated regions of Canada, I *still* say, “We’re full up”. Our ancestors developed our Anglo-American culture in a land with a relatively low person/land ratio and that’s an integral part of our culture. The wide open space made us who we are and it’s an important component of our cultural genocide that folk living in all parts of the ‘Old World’ tell us, “No, you have so much space, you can take these refugees and still have plenty of room!”. No; we can’t. I don’t want the population densities of Europe, never mind southeast Asia.
Clearly what Japan needs is tens of millions of illiterate hostile foreigners to not-fill the jobs left vacant by retiring Japanese. They just don’t know what joys of diversity they’re missing out on!
As the number of school age children drops the less money you spend on schools, that money is diverted to the elderly. It isn’t a case of spending more and more on both. You adjust services to reflect the population.
A slightly smaller stable population might be in Japan’s best interest. Who knows, maybe Japan will lead us into a 21st century economic model that doesn’t resemble the 19th century model of importing or finding cheap labor. Through technology one man should be able to work more efficiently, thus producing more and earning more. And if women had the option to take care of their families because their husbands worked more efficiently the state would spend less on elder care. A wife who has the time to care for her children as well as older parents is preferable to locking old people away in institutions.
Once they have reached their population goal (say 100 million) then you structure the tax code such that people with no children pay the highest tax rate. People who have more than 3 children would lose their child-tax benefit as well.
All I know is that our policies of allowing non-assimilatable third worlders to flood in while sending as many jobs as possible overseas is a recipe for disaster that Helen Keller could have seen.
Don’t married couples already have financial advantages single folks don’t have? Now they want to give them even more advantages?
I have been to Japan. It is incredibly crowded. Believe me it could do with fewer people.
Almost every time a nation exclaims “We need more babies from our citizens,” they nearly always discuss and propose taxing the general populace and extending benefits to expectant women and young mothers.
No one seems to be interested in understanding and encouraging men to become fathers. If marriage and children are seen by half a population as mere hinderances and costs, um, maybe that could be part of the reluctance to reproduce?
“These statistics are so bogus. It wasn’t too long ago they were saying the population would half by 2050. Now it’s at 25 percent?”
That’s because since “too long ago” they’ve already lost 25%.
Cat Patrol wrote at 9:38 PM on September 30:
“Does anyone really think these welfare cases are going to grow up to be scientists or engineers?”
You hit the nail right on the head! Too many racially-conscious Whites fail to realize this, but not all Whites are created equal, either. Aesop said it best in his fable of the lioness and her cub:
“Quality is more important than quantity.”
In the case of the Japanese, what good is having more babies if they’re mainly being produced by people from the lower end of the bell curve? Care should be taken to insure that most of the children being born are to people with college degrees. As noted by others, Japan can afford to shed a few million citizens through attrition.
In the case of the intellecutal have-nots, perhaps the gov’t can set up a “gene bank” that would allow these people to access sperm and eggs donated (sold?) by the more cognitively-blessed members of society (anyone remember Prof. Shockley?). Those who do so would qualify for the stipends.
This is not as far-fetched as you would think. The Japanese have a much more group-oriented mindset than us Westerners. Whether it’s due to cultural or biological factors (or both) is irrelevant; it’s there. All it would take is for their political, economic and spiritual leaders to get behind it and it should take off.
The Japanese would of course be funding the births of Japanese. Whether this would eventually allow them to stabilize their population remains to be seen. But they are looking out for their own. In the US, the white hating, the West hating elites fund intentionally fund the births of non-whites, and are still scrambling to find more ways to transfer the earnings from middle class whites to non-whites via healthcare, more social services, etc. This shows the Japanese do still run Japan. I guess real whites haven’t been in charge of the US since the early 60’s.
She says requiring health insurance to cover fertility treatments may also be a good idea.
This idea is so good an will produce such great results that the powers that be will make absolutely certain it does not go through.
Here is why:
If insurance had to cover the cost of in vitro fertilization the costs would drop from $30 thousand per live birth to less than $3000 per live birth. Then men and women would begin getting the best women to donate oocytes on a massive scale… in less than two generations the Japanese will take the entire earth.
Keep in mind that 1) Japan doesn’t have a massive minority population that would benefit from such funds, 2) there’s a lot more than the IQ bell curve to genetics and heritability (a fact often overlooked), and 3) even the poorer and (maybe) less intelligent Japanese are still Japanese - good, law-abiding, disciplinate, nice Japanese people. If these people make more like themselves it will be perfectly fine for their country.
There are few other solutions to the two big problems: demographic decline, and the leftists whose greatest desire is to inflict Third World immigrants upon their respective countries.
Also, eugenics is scary. The prime reason that we want to keep Europe white, is because we value the identity and tradition of European countries. Eugenics sets us along a path that leads directly to transhumanism and the destruction of the very identity and traditions we love. I want my great-grandchildren to resemble my great-grandparents, not monstrous genetically engineered ubermenschen.
Italian wrote at 9:45 PM on October 1:
“Also, eugenics is scary.”
It’s been my experience that people who find the subject of Eugenics scary do so for one of the following reasons:
1) In the case of low-IQ, crime-prone racial/ethnic groups, they realize they have the most to lose.
2) They have been brainwashed by leftists into believing that Eugenics will invariably lead to a Nazi-style government, forgetting that countries like America, Sweden, Singapore, Japan and believe it or not, Mexico, all at one time had Eugenics-style laws on their books. Logicians term this fallacious argument “Reductio ad Hitlerum.”
3) Their religious beliefs preclude them from feeling otherwise. I do not know what your religious beliefs are (or even if you have any) but I’ll not argue them. Instead (assuming you’re a Christian) I’ll direct you or anyone else reading this who is a Christian to an amazing webpage I found set up by a Christian group dealing with the subject of Eugenics.
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/dysgenic.htm
Transhumanism and Eugenics are two different philosophies. In fact, each term encompasses a number of philosophies. Our identities and traditions are being destroyed, anyway. Even if our enemies weren’t doing it, they’d change over time.
Example: 1,200 years ago the Franks dominated Western Europe. Where are they now? Obviously their descendants are still with us, but they don’t call themselves “Franks” anymore.
“I want my great-grandchildren to resemble my great-grandparents, not monstrous genetically engineered ubermenschen.”
I want my children (and their children) to be better than me. I would think every real parent feels the same way. If genetic engineering can accomplish this, I say go for it. I don’t fear Gattaca. I fear the world the way it is now and what it’s becoming.
To ITstudent:
I’m afraid you are wrong if you believe that the Koreans and Chinese can integrate together with the Japanese as the French and German immigrants did in the US. You misunderstand the Japanese mentality and culture. The Japanese have long taken pride in their racial purity; they do not consider themselves to be the brethren of other East Asians. Look at the Japanese propaganda during World War II. They believed they were preordained to beat the Americans because the Americans were a mongrel nation and the Japanese were the divinely-descended, pure and unified Yamoto race. To this day, to be frank, many Japanese (really probably most) look down upon the Chinese and Koreans. There already is a long-time Korean minority in Japan. Even though these ethnic Koreans were born in Japan, the Japanese do not consider them Japanese and do not treat them as equals.
If the Japanese did import other Orientals to labor for them as their population declines, the last thing on earth most of them would want would be for their minority populations to integrate in with larger society. If the minorities keep separated it is easier to keep the native group cohesive and “pure” and to expel the other groups once they are no longer need. Case in point, before the economic crisis the Japanese encouraged ethnic Japanese in Brazil to return to Japan. However, these people (yes, ethnic Japanese) have not integrated into society and most Japanese consider them to be foreigners. The last I heard the Japanese were now trying to get them to move back to Brazil.
No, it seems clear to me the Japanese should not (and I think will not want to) import any foreigners to pick up the slack. A higher native birthrate and greater mechanization/robotics are the ways to go. Would that the West would be so logical!
To the first anonymous:
You make some good points. Japan certainly is overcrowded at the moment. However, what people need to remember is that population decreases should happen gradually, otherwise the nation’s economy will suffer. In addition, once a people get into the habit of having very few children what will make a largely childless society start having children again once they reach the target population? If people get used to having two children instead of three that’s one thing, but it is a totally different thing (and far more jarring for the country) if they are suddenly having zero to one instead.
To the anonymous poster who replied about eugenics:
It is false that low-IQ minorities have the most to lose. They are the ones who have the most to gain. If you carry eugenics to its logical consequence, which is the pre-implantation selection of embryos on the basis of intelligence, you will soon see an abundance of high-IQ Blacks.
That would be only the first step. You must take into account that policies take a different meaning depending on the historical context. Eugenics was not transhumanism back when Sweden and other countries implemented eugenicist policies, but if the same were done in the present day it would be inseparable from transhumanist ideas. If you make a step towards eugenics in the present day, it means you’re supporting the more general idea that you can redesign the human body.
This leads to changes of a very different order compared to the evolution of the Franks into Frenchmen.
The final step would be radical genetical engineering, cybernetics, etc. which among other things would effectively erase the ability/IQ gap between whites and other races. Those races would then be able to replace us even more effectively.
Some here will say that such an outcome is not undesirable at all. The problem is that there’s a divide here between IQ-ists and racial nationalists. The former are simply concerned with the intellectual level of the global population and may even see an Asian or Jewish takeover of the world as a desirable outcome. The latter treasure our heritage and will shudder not just at the thought of facing competition from blacks with an artificially high IQ, but most importantly, at the thought that our beloved genepool is going to change uncontrollably.
Why uncontrollably? Aren’t we in control? Well, no, I don’t think we are. This kind of things tend to spiral out of control.
It’s also pointless to debate whether or not eugenics is a good thing. Eugenics is beside the point, because the problem is not that we aren’t intelligent enough. The problem is that we’re threatened by alien races, and eugenics is not the solution to this.
I don’t particularly want my children to be “better than me”. I want them to be happy and well-adjusted to life.
Italian wrote at 11:41 PM on October 2:
“It is false that low-IQ minorities have the most to lose. They are the ones who have the most to gain.”
Then why don’t you see any blacks and latinos out there demanding state-funded Eugenics programs for them? Why do I also see so many blacks coming out against the idea of Eugenics?
http://www.blackinformant.com/our-children/blacks-and-eugenics-a-k-a-family-planning
http://www.blackgenocide.org/sanger.html
http://www.plaidder.com/eugen.htm
“If you carry eugenics to its logical consequence, which is the pre-implantation selection of embryos on the basis of intelligence, you will soon see an abundance of high-IQ Blacks.”
Nonsense! That would assume there was a significant amount of high-IQ blacks available to donate sperm and eggs, and there aren’t. Fact: American blacks have an avg. IQ of only 85, which means only 1/6 of them have IQs over 100. Though they make up 13% of the population of the U.S., Linda Gottfredson estimates only about 5,000 of them have genius-level IQs. You’re dreaming!
Blacks are also grossly overrepresented in our prison population.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/tables/cpracepttab.htm
The late psychologist Hans Eysenck demonstrated that criminality was 60% heritable. If eugenics policies were put in place across the board, blacks and latinos would soon become a lot fewer in number (thus losing political clout), and they know it! They’re dumb, but they’re not THAT dumb!
“If you make a step towards eugenics in the present day, it means you’re supporting the more general idea that you can redesign the human body.”
So what? If you’re really an atheist, you’d know from reading books on evolutionary biology the human body has a lot of flaws in it; flaws which are easily identifiable, such as genetic disorders. Example: Jews used eugenic principles to virtually eliminate Tay-Sachs disease from their numbers. By your “logic,” they were wrong for doing so.
http://pytheasonline.blogspot.com/2005/01/quiet-eugenics-nearly-eliminates.html
“If you make a step towards eugenics in the present day, it means you’re supporting the more general idea that you can redesign the human body.”
But we can redesign the human body, and we do it all the time. IVF and pre-implantation genetic diagnositcs are just two in an increasingly larger number of ways of how we can do it. Evolution is no longer a mystery except to those who refuse to accept the reality of it.
By the way, a lot of people practice Eugenics without even realizing it. The White woman who marries a White man because she wants White kids is practicing Eugenics. The man with the advanced university degree who marries a highly educated woman is doing likewise.
“The final step would be radical genetical engineering, cybernetics, etc. which among other things would effectively erase the ability/IQ gap between whites and other races. Those races would then be able to replace us even more effectively.”
Forgive me for saying this, but now you’re starting to sound like a science fiction writer. Futurism is not a science; it’s pure speculation. By the way, there’s only one sure way one race can replace another, and that’s by outbreeding them. The black and brown races here are doing a spectacular job of that without Eugenics.
Short of implanting White/Yellow genes for intelligence in the genomes of their embryos, there is simply no way you’re going to make blacks and latinos as intelligent as us. That, by the way, would require two things:
1) identifying the genes for human intelligence (and their alleles). By the way, there doesn’t seem to be any rush to do that.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115040765329081636-T5DQ4jvnwqOdVvsP_XSVG_lvgik_20060628.html?mod=blogs
2) perfecting genetic recoding, which is decades away from being done, if in fact it could ever be done.
“I don’t particularly want my children to be “better than me”. I want them to be happy and well-adjusted to life.”
No offense, but aren’t cattle that way?
Dreaming? You must consider the development of new technologies. Maybe you want to take a look here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1563828/Clinics-to-grow-human-eggs.html
Incidentally, I wasn’t even talking about egg or sperm donation. I was talking about embryo selection with pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. In theory, that alone could raise one’s IQ by one standard deviation, especially if you make many embryos and then choose. Though of course the right genes aren’t known yet.
Yes, I know, that’s why I’m on this site. We have blacks and other minorities in my country too and they cause trouble here as well.
“The late psychologist Hans Eysenck demonstrated that criminality was 60% heritable. If eugenics policies were put in place across the board, blacks and latinos would soon become a lot fewer in number (thus losing political clout), and they know it! They’re dumb, but they’re not THAT dumb!”
Yes, eugenics was a way to contain minorities, intentionally so, back when it was triumphant in the mid-century. But today? Fighting blacks with eugenics? Impossibile! Even if I live in Italy (as you can infer from my name), I know that in the US, there’s something called affirmative action. I immagine we are going to have it in Italy too, once there are enough blacks and other minority people over here. If you could defeat affirmative action and political correctness, there wouldn’t be any need at all for eugenics – the number of minorities both native and immigrant would dwindle spontaneously due to less welfare, and in any event it would become OK to implement policies such as racial profiling, or just allowance of serious employment testing, which would prevent most of the problems minorities cause. But as long as affirmative action exists, you’re the one dreaming.
In my opinion it is not because eugenics is an actual threat to them in the present, but simply because blacks are always eager to play the victim and allege fantastic persecutions of their kin. In the first one of your links on blacks versus eugenics, the page there lists a number of quotes that should exemplify the eugenicist conspiracy against blacks. They are all 30 or 40 years old, and that’s because since the seventies nobody any longer talks about eugenics in a way that could be remotely threatening to minorities.
The problem is that it is perfectly possibile and in fact, likely to have a kind of eugenics that does not threaten blacks and does not help Whites. So maybe you sincerely believe that by upholding eugenics, you’re fighting blacks. But in reality, should it happen that eugenicist ideas become widespread again, that would be in the interests of fertility clinics and transhumanist medical research, both of which do not share our pro-White agenda, and on the contrary will be eager to distance themselves from “racists” and realize a different eugenics – a politically correct eugenics, sans racial discrimination, which will make selections and cuts only within individual races, and will be good for the fertility clinic business and for the reputation of researchers.
“Forgive me for saying this, but now you’re starting to sound like a science fiction writer.”
That’s because it’s full out there of top scientists who do talk about these things and do sound like science fiction writers. Honestly I don’t have the time to go looking for precise links, but you can take a look at this magazine:http://www.hplusmagazine.com
As for blacks and minorities replacing us… yes they are already doing that, as you rightly pointed out. Seems to me that one of the few ways we can hope to continue thriving is by filling the ecological niche of higher IQ people. Should it happen, in the future, that the IQ gap between the races close, then we could no longer make use of that strategy. That is not my only fear anyway. I know it’s about the remote future, and I guess i used that particolar point only because I thought it was the most immediately effective and shocking. I’m more generally afraid that we lose our humanity.
I believe that the only way we can prevent the transhumanist scenario from realizing, is by making a strong, principled stand against the manipulation and re-engineering of the human body. That has to include stopping eugenics, which is clearly part of the problem.
“So what? If you’re really an atheist, you’d know from reading books on evolutionary biology the human body has a lot of flaws in it; flaws which are easily identifiable, such as genetic disorders.”
You don’t believe I’m really an atheist? Why would I lie to you? It would be a silly thing to do. Yes, I have an unusual set of opinions. One has to think with his own head.
“Jews used eugenic principles to virtually eliminate Tay-Sachs disease from their numbers. By your “logic,” they were wrong for doing so.”
So what is eugenics? For instance, the posts in this thread I initially objected to were clearly eugenicist in mindset – to discourage low-class Japanese from reproducing, as if they represented a problem or a liability for Japanese society! That is of course only a mild form of eugenical thinking, and I criticized it only lightly, and only because I don’t think low-class Japanese are a problem for Japan, but it would be a very different story if it were possibile to discourage American blacks or European gipsies from reproducing, unfortunately that will never be possibile. But, far more scary is what Sweden, Japan and other first world countries used to do up to a few decades ago, which you even cited as a positive examples. We are talking about *forced* state sterilizations and abortions – immoral, and one can’t object strongly enough to that. Is that your model of eugenics?
“But we can redesign the human body, and we do it all the time. IVF and pre-implantation genetic diagnositcs are just two in an increasingly larger number of ways of how we can do it.”
Exactly – that is what i don’t like!
Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis is another objectionable pseudo-eugenicist practice. To begin with - it kills embryos, and while I’m not a Christian and not a radical anti-abortion fanatic, I do grant that there is at least a little bit of undesirability in destroying embryos, and if you do destroy them, you’d better have a damn good excuse, and I don’t see it here. Keep in mind that those embryos are produced exclusively for the screening – we’re talking about 12 to 30 embryos trashed for every baby that is born. And in any case, I find these practices worrysome for the same reasons I mentioned above – the redesigning of people.
You see, when the whole pre-implantation genetic diagnosis thing began in Britain, first they said it was only for cases in which there’s an almost certainty of developing a deadly disease early in life. Then it became the remote probability of contracting non-100%-deadly cancer when you’re old. Then it became strabism, an entirely cosmetic problem which can be easily corrected with surgery anyway! What’s next, killing embryos for eye color or shape of ears? As you can see they keep shifting the line. Once the practice is in place, it soon spirals out of control. That’s why I’m suspicious when I’m told that the purpose of eugenics is to prevent horrible deadly diseases. The impact of eugenics goes far beyond the prevention of those diseases.
Evolution is not into question here. (?????)
“No offense, but aren’t cattle that way?”
You seem to believe that what makes us human, what sets us apart from animals, is that we want “better children”. Ironically, even though you’re an atheist, you sound very religious here. It is religious people who usually appeal to “what makes us different from animals”, by which they mean the tension toward perfection, toward God. Others not believing in God but still religious in style, such as the fervent Marxists, replace that with a strife for the communist utopia. For you it’s the improvement of the race. But there are enough things already that divide us from animals, beginning with logical thinking. So rest assured that whatever we do, we don’t run any risk of becoming less than human.
As for “wanting better children” versus “wanting them to be happy”… My parents made me and my sibling with the mindset that their priority was not to fulfill some vain parental pride, but to selflessly ensure our own happiness and well-being. I think it is a very wise mindset. Obviously it doesn’t exclude wanting one’s descendant to be White, which is not vanity but rather a honorable act of loyalty toward one’s own people. Now, you could certainly argue that eugenics is the best way to ensure children’s happiness (which thing I doubt). But it seems to me that your support of eugenics is due not to a wish for happy children, but rather a wish for the perfect child. You revealed this by replying “aren’t cattle that way” to my statement that kids should be happy first and foremost. So maybe you’re beginning with the wrong foot.
In fact, I invite you to re-read my long post and replace “affirmative action” with “political correctness”. That is what I really meant.
Italian:
You’re not wrong. That has to be one of the creepiest things I’ve ever read.
These people are insane.
And they have the nerve to call US (white nationalists) extremists!
