I worked in Japan for a year as a journalist for TIME in 2006 and ’07, and here’s what I realized: the Japanese do everything first. Camera phones, Zen Buddhism, little fuel-efficient cars, huge public debt, a stagnant economy, the literary acceptance of comic books — what happens first in Japan eventually makes its way to the rest of the world. And that includes declining birthrates. One of the biggest social issues I covered in Japan was the increasingly low marriage rate among young people and the vanishingly small birthrate, which translated to an aging — and eventually shrinking — population. The issue dominated the media, and I wrote about it several times. But the public angst made little difference. Most young Japanese women simply didn’t seem interested in having many children — at least not under the conditions of Japanese society.
Now what began in Japan is happening globally. As David Brooks wrote in his New York Times column yesterday, fertility is on the decline in much of the world, from Iran — 1.7 births per woman — to Russia, where low fertility combined with high death rates mean the population is already shrinking. To Brooks, the world is facing what the writer Phillip Longman has called the gray tsunami — a moment the population over 60 swamps those under 30.
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