birthrate

aging society

trivia

is low in Japan as a result of a lack of leisure time, widely dispersed social networks and Japanese simply not having any way to find suitable partners.

Shigesato Takahashi, chief demographer for the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, has examined reams of census data and believes the decline of matchmaking is the single most important cause for Japan's population crisis. Without leisure time, widely dispersed social networks, and family intermediaries, young Japanese simply have no way to find suitable partners, he says.

business

businessman

Japan

leisure

work

overwork

Japanese society

, in Japan, is low as a result of requisite after-work bonding consuming too much time to meet significant others.

'These days,' Takahashi told me, 'it is very difficult to find a girlfriend or a relationship that will ultimately end up in marriage''because work, and the requisite after-work bonding, consumes too much time. 'If you look at our data, many young single people just don't have any friends of the opposite sex. Sexual activity in Japan hasn't really changed that much, but there is more sexual activity without marriage, and therefore less household formation.'

hard work

overtime

is low in Japan due to the fact that women see Japanese society as so inimical to working women and so hostile to modern ways of child-rearing that they simply won't raise a baby there.

Although many women yearn to have children, they view Japan as a society so inimical to working women and so hostile to modern ways of child-rearing that they simply won't raise a baby there. 'If we get pregnant, we're moving to Australia,' declared Yuki, twenty-nine, whose Japanese husband obtained his law degree in Melbourne. 'I could never raise my child in a society as rigid as Japan. So we've agreed, if we get pregnant, [the baby] is going to be raised outside.'

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