TOKYO, May 15, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A Japanese government agency released a report last week saying that, 25 years from now, the number of women of childbearing age will be half the level it was in 2010 in half the municipalities across Japan.
The Japan Policy Council (JPC) said in a new report released on May 8 said that 896 (49.8 percent) of 1,800 cities, towns, and villages across Japan will see the population of women between the ages of 20 and 39 drain away because of a devastatingly low birthrate and the constant flow of young generations from rural areas to major cities.
Women in that demographic accounted for more than 90 percent of those who gave birth in 2012.
The report states that some smaller municipalities could be “at risk of perishing.”
According to JPC estimates, the loss of more than 50 percent of young women in municipalities could cause difficulties in maintaining social security services, including nursing care and medical insurance, as well as employment.
The report cites the village of Nanmoku in Gunma Prefecture, which is expected to lose almost 90 percent of its young women by 2040, the highest ratio of loss of all cities, towns and villages across Japan.
“We support raising children, but we just don't have many workplaces available,” said one village official, while another added, “The number shows us what will happen if we take no action.”
According to the Asahi Shimbun news service, the number of Japanese births hit a record low in 2013 while the death rate was the highest since the end of World War II. Health ministry officials determined that the nation’s population fell by a record 244,000 for the year.
“The trend of population decline will likely continue for a substantially long period of time,” a ministry official said, pointing out that Japan has experienced a decrease in its population for seven consecutive years.
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A government-appointed panel has proposed measures to counter Japan's fertility implosion and rapid decline in population, such as offering more support for parents and encouraging the immigration of foreign skilled workers.
Paying parents to have children has been shown to be largely ineffective in raising fertility rates in countries where it has been tried, and Japan has virtually no immigration, although a slight uptick in foreign resident workers in 2013 slightly mitigated the overall decline in the nation’s population.
Dr. Brian Clowes, director of research for Human Life International (HLI), wrote that Japan’s population was the first in the world to dip beneath replacement fertility half a century ago, in 1960, and its total fertility rate has continued to plunge.
“It now stands at an astonishing 1.1 children per woman (half that required for replacement), and will continue to decline to 0.6 children per woman by 2050,” Dr. Clowes wrote.
“Since 1995, the Japanese government has tried everything to get women to have more babies,” Clowes observed, “including greatly increased child care benefits, but without any result…The government even pays for so-called 'speed dating.' But once you get people addicted to things and tell them for decades that babies are a burden, that they interfere with your wants and your needs, and they are bad for the environment, your nation is doomed.”
“No nation in history has recovered from a total fertility rate as low as Japan’s,” he warned.
He added that when the world’s total fertility rate hits replacement level in two years, its population will peak in three decades, and then begin to decline.
“Yet the population control cartel continues to abort, sterilize, and contracept the people of the world just as fast as they can. The time to end population control programs and promote larger families is now,” Dr. Clowes concluded.