Japan's Demographic Time Bomb | Insight | Full Episode

Japan tackles traditional values to deal with a labour shortage, sparked by rapidly decreasing birth rates and an ageing society.

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ABOUT THE SHOW: Insight investigates and analyses topical issues that impact Asia and the rest of the world.
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[SayuriBlossoms]

you can't have it both ways, ppl literally working themselves to death, and/or working crazy overtime hours AND wanting the citizens to have families. that's absolutely nonsense lol

[touchmeoverlord]

Imagine being interviewed then watching this docu and seeing they subtitled you in english, when you were speaking english.

[Jiro]

Plot twist: The people were turned to dolls for disrespecting her 1 by 1

[Baddogbling]

I think by the end of my lifetime I will be able to see how this problem plays out which is really interesting

[jackielee]

Well if I was a 25yr Japanese women from a family of only childs, just finished uni and now have to find a job in a country where everyone is over qualified and there’s not an abundance of good paying jobs because their all taken, and I have to look after both my parents and my grandparents and might even have to worry about looking after my spouses parents or grandparents, I wouldn’t want to have a kid. That’s 5 people I have to look after not including myself or if I plan to have more than 1 kid or accidentally have twins. Parents+grandparents+own kids+ im pregnate and can’t go to work and have to look after my kids= my spouse has to take care of 11 people with his job.

[adeleodornan]

its very sad about the doll town. its creepy in a way but i feel bad for the woman there technically all by herself in that town. :(

[nikm]

My country Croatia lost 15% of population in last 30 years, and what does the government do? They increased taxing to be the biggest in EU, created huge bureaucratic machine to "increase" employment and doing absolutely NOTHING to restart the demographics via subvention or some other type of financing. The result is there are NO qualified workers and growing national debt.

[Aja-Christian]

Womenomics is all well and good on the surface, but typically women who focus on their careers put off getting married and having kids longer anyway, if at all. Actually a huge part of the reason why so many countries are experiencing low birth rates now is because my generation (millennials) are having a harder time achieving financial stability. Why would you want to start a family when you can barely sustain yourself? There has to be more incentive than the government just saying "Well we need more of our citizens to breed so our economy won't collapse." You have over qualified people settling for low skill, low wage jobs (or temporary-contract work), and they don't even make enough to afford to live by themselves. Housing is expensive, childcare is expensive...all in all I can totally understand how many people would rather bypass parenthood altogether.

[mariej]

What I learned about Japan so far;
1. stagnant population growth (death and births are at balance, not necessarily a threat to the country's future)
2. People working hard for personal economic growth, competitive hardworking culture
3. People prefer urban to rural life, major cities are highly favored.
4. Unemployment is due to location of the job, not necessarily lack of employment opportunities.

[sunset.]

24:03
what thats mr abae's trump card more women workers or making the problem worse.Working women has less babies as they have to be in two place at once.

[criegdover]

Didn't the Spartans die of relatively the same thing?

[upthedown]

You cannot burn the candle at both ends. How are people who work such long hours sopposed to have time to have a family. You have to set your priorities straight. I find the situation you are in bizarre.

[Boudica]

I have very sad news. Akihitu's virtual anime wife just filed for divorce. She said she wanted a real man.

[monicadumas]

Here in my country, the elders or your parents insisted you to get married and have a family if you're still single at the age of 25-30 and talked about loneliness if you'll get old. Like a threat what will happen for you when you get old, live alone and no one will took care of you.

[TyFreeborn]

Generally good analysis, but at the 6 min mark they say, with regard to Japan during WW2, "Millions of people lost their lives." This is true (estimated between 2.5 and 3.1 million in total combined military and civilian) and especially costly with an estimated population of only 72 million citizens in 1940.
Then the video goes on in the next sentence to say, "600 million industrial facilities were destroyed." What? Obviously they cannot mean that each and every Japanese citizen (man, woman, and child) on average owned or ran 8.33 industrial facilities each. That would be absurd. Somehow there was a proofreading failure during production.

[SuspendaS]

The dolls are scary as heck, even with people they wouldn't want to go there.

[rudijl]

Married with doll. Oh my gosh.
that is out of my thinking.

[keyboarddancers]

Exactly the same thing is happening in Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea.

[bigbuggie]

Dr. Korekawa said that fertility was high during world war 2 but then the government slowed it down after that. What was it that they did to do that?

[Misuci]

34:28 More efficiency, more productivity fails to produce higher level of reproduction ....