Japan Lost 3M People in Five Years (nytimes.com)

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Make life affordable and give time outside work, and the population crisis* will fix itself.

Keep insisting on Draconian hours for unlivable pay, and you get what you asked for.

* Falling population is a political problem, not a social one. It also feels like this is the system working as intended from the higher ups.

Awfully careless if you ask me. They gotta keep better track, maybe put AirTags on some of these people. /s

(I'm making fun of the weird phrasing of the headline. It's obviously a serious issue for the nation of Japan).

Why is it a crisis for populations to decline to levels of the first half of the 20th century? The world worked just fine back then with that number of people.

There are problems that arise from a population that contains a lot of old people, but that's a problem that fixes itself in a few decades, and balance will be restored.

Pick one crisis: no jobs, or no people.

While working in Japan, I once asked my Japanese supervisor what he was doing for his next vacation. He responded that he never took a vacation and had, in fact, accrued some ridiculous amount of PTO over many years that he never intended to use. がんばって!

Japan's population is 123M, about what it was in 1990. It's a small, densely populated island. It's not a crisis.