Japan is heading for trouble, the country’s prime minster Fumio Kishida has suggested. ‘Our country is on the brink of being unable to maintain the functions of society,’ he said in a speech earlier this week. Japan’s birth rate, the average number of children a woman will have, is too low, and still falling. It’s 1.3, and needs to be 2.1 to keep the population stable. With every year that passes, there are hundreds of thousands fewer Japanese people.
Economics is mostly to blame. Once, there was a secure and predictable life was for the average Japanese person. The men would toil away at a big company in return for the assurance of lifetime employment. Even if you became surplus to requirements, or were a complete duffer, you would be kept on, if only to stare out of the window.
Women, meanwhile, were expected to make babies, run the household, and wisely spend the money that their exhausted husbands would hand over to them.
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