As the global fertility crisis deepens, the world keeps looking for a convenient explanation. Housing prices, perhaps. Feckless millennials, the Peter Pan generation that never grew up. Too few rights for women or, depending on who you ask, too many. Everyone seems to have a take.
There may be lessons to be learned from the first nation to tackle this crisis. Yet we often seem determined not to learn them. That was my takeaway from “Alone in Japan,” a new book by British author Tom Feiling that seeks to examine and explain why it is the poster child for declining births.
Feiling, who lived in Japan for a few years in the early 1990s and then returned in the late 2010s, travels the country observing its aging society. It may no longer be unique but it’s worthy of examination, with over twice as many deaths as births.
Yet the book ends up reaching for the familiar stereotypes — sexlessness, loneliness, overwork, the collapse of the Bubble economy — as explanations for what he somewhat crudely terms the people’s “failure to reproduce.”
Predictable tropes abound: Pampered pets that usurp the place of children; hikikomori, the shut-in youth who shun a cruel society; the country’s limp sex life that leads to marrying virtual idols instead. Some mid-2000s references, such as “herbivorous men” and “parasite singles,” are jarringly out of place today, as if a Japanese writer pointed the finger at “metrosexuals” when discussing the troubles of modern Western society. Even when relevant, such labels paint groups with lazy brushstrokes that avoid the work of understanding larger changes.
Like many, Feiling draws the comparison between the decline of Japan’s population and its economic might. But the birthrate began to fall during the heydays of the 70s and 80s. The dated observations are summed up by a reference to tax revenues that have “halved” since 1991. In fact, they are currently at record highs; the figure cited seems to date to around 2012.
But I was most uncomfortable with the portrait of a people as unloving, ground down and “resigned to lives of drudgery.” In one episode, the author says he’d “rarely seen a mother hug or kiss her child.” In another, a man stroking a cat is presented as an act of rebellion: “It had been so long since I’d seen any display of physical affection,” Feiling writes, “that there was something almost illicit about the scene.” Women are depicted as victims, lacking in agency. It rarely seems to occur that, for some, having fewer children is a conscious choice made from a position of opportunity. Where it is shown as such, it is an act “of rebellion against an all-pervading system that sacrifices people’s emotional life to the demands of a work-obsessed society.”
It is well past time we Westerners stopped discussing Japanese society like this.
Declining fertility here (and in South Korea, China, Singapore and elsewhere in Asia) is so often framed negatively: a backlash, rebellion, protest against a crushing society. When it happens in the U.S., though, it’s young women “taking control over their lives,” as the New York Times wrote.
We can no longer discuss hikikomori or NEETs (those not in employment, education or training) as a phenomenon caused by a uniquely high-pressure education and work culture when almost 1 million Britons aged 16 to 24 are now themselves NEETs and a quarter of the working-age population in the U.K. is not employed for reasons including what has been dubbed a mental health crisis.
When Americans continue to report having less and less sex, why discuss Shintoism’s obsession with purification as a reason for why the Japanese do it less? Niche activities such as sex robots and marrying virtual characters make for good content, but offer little insight.
There are lessons to be learned from Japan confronting this problem first, but we won’t find them if we continue to look askance at a nation. That was the wrong response 20 years ago, but perhaps forgivable when it was an outlier. Now that many other nations are dealing with the same issue, we should look instead to what is actually happening.
We could examine what policy responses work and which don’t; where money can be effectively utilized and where it’s a waste; what measures can be taken to alleviate a declining population and which should be avoided (perhaps inevitably, the book endorses mass immigration as the solution, despite the political ructions it is causing elsewhere).
There are moments where Feiling seems to grasp this. Yet he retreats to the reductive analysis in his final chapter, aptly titled “No Sex, No Kids, No Future.” We won’t figure out how to contend with these changes if we continue to reach for cultural chauvinism.
