For economists, “Japanification” is living life in a low-growth economy. For three decades, Japan experienced 1 percent growth, and its national institutions justified all fiscal and monetary policy as emergency measures meant to achieve a revival. The result was low interest rates and massive monetary easing, but no inflation, and no growth.
We’ve gotten used to these policy measures since the crash of 2007 and 2008. And we had not climbed out of them before doubling down on them to handle the COVID-19 pandemic.
Economic stagnation is a real concern, but it is only part of the story of Japanification. The scale of the problem is revealed in any number of odd or humorous stories about Japan that go viral on the Web.
In August, there was a lighthearted report about three Japanese grandmothers from the rural Miyama area of the Fukui prefecture. These ladies, pictured bearing their airsoft rifles, called themselves the “Monkey Busters” as they defended the local crops from the encroachment of a gang of monkeys. In November the New York Times reported a story from the northern Japanese prefecture of Hokkaido. Town officials installed a “monster wolf” with glowing red eyes and bared teeth. It was one of a number of monsters installed in Takikawa City to scare away bears. Another monster wolf was installed in the Chiba prefecture to scare away boars and deer.
The stories go viral because they play on certain stereotypes of Japanese inscrutability and the relationship of Japanese people to animatronic monsters, like the kind featured in endless iterations of Godzilla and its imitators.
But what these stories show is that in the natural environment, Japanese humans are becoming something like an endangered species. Hokkaido, once a center of bustling development and growth, is shrinking rapidly. Every human settlement must regulate its boundaries, but in Japan the monkeys, bears, and deer are on the offensive, and Japanese people are fighting a rearguard action. In a growing society, it is young and middle-aged men who patrol the boundaries. In a shrinking one such as Japan’s, it’s the elderly ladies.
Japan’s population peaked at around 128 million people in 2010. Since then it has been shrinking. The overall population declined in 2018 by 430,000, the equivalent of a midsize city. In raw numbers, Japan’s depopulation is proceeding at a pace that would keep up with or exceed the number of deaths inflicted during the height of Curtis LeMay’s terrifying fire-bombing campaign in the crescendo of World War II. LeMay’s campaign ended after a year. But Japan will continue to lose its midsize-city equivalents year after year, and there is no end in sight.
Japan’s fertility rate continues to fall and is now approximately 1.4 per woman, having dropped below replacement level back in the late 1970s. The effect on the social structure of Japan is radical. A below-replacement-level fertility rate could be considered something like a critically low rate of investment in posterity and in one’s own golden years. By hoarding and consuming the society’s resources through middle age, a generation of Japan has entered its old age without the economic and social protection offered by adult children. Thus the political process has to extract more resources from a shrinking productive-age cohort to support the elderly.
And the effect is compounding. Japan has 3.4 million people in their forties and fifties who have never married and still live with their parents. Many of them are out of work, precisely because the opportunities for their generation decreased as their parents’ generation held on to their sinecures. Bloomberg reports that “Japan has an estimated 613,000 middle-aged hikikomori, a term usually used to describe socially withdrawn adolescents who hole up in their bedrooms, according to the results of a government survey released in March of last year.”
That extremely stunted cohort of socially withdrawn middle-aged people is surrounded by an even larger group of “grass-eating men,” a term of art built around the Japanese term for sex, which translates to “relationship in flesh.” In 2015, nearly 18 percent of Japanese males between the ages of 16 and 49 reported having no interest in sex. For those between the ages of 25 and 29, the rate was over 20 percent.
This lack of children and the compounding lack of family formation will, absent an unforeseeable productivity revolution, necessarily depress economic growth, leading to real economic contraction as well.
When National Review was a young magazine, James Burnham described liberalism as an ideology of Western suicide that justified the diminution and destruction of civilization. In Japan, we are actually witnessing what civilizational suicide looks like in the flesh. It makes for a society of mentally distressed adult children who surf the Internet, their stasis compounded by the monopolization of resources by elderly people who consume too much of society’s attention even as they enable the adolescence of their 50-year-old offspring. The fear of men like Burnham was that civilization would be dissolved by dystopian communism, what George Orwell saw as a “boot stamping on a human face — forever.” Orwell’s vision was of history being shoved down a memory hole and burned. But what was not accomplished with communism and coercion is proceeding in Japan with condoms and adult cartoons. Without a posterity to take it up, Japan’s history and traditions begin to lose their value even in the present.
America’s fertility rate, long bolstered by higher-fertility immigrants, has crashed to 1.77 births per woman. After dipping below replacement level in the 1970s, it had climbed to over 2 births per woman in the new millennium before diving to all-time lows in recent years. Immigrants rapidly accustom themselves to this lifestyle, meaning that the U.S. is becoming on the whole a population-shredder. The marriage rate in the United States hit a new low in 2017–18, just 6.5 marriages a year per 1,000 people. Marriage rates have resumed a generation-long decline. The Institute for Family Studies has begun tracing a sex recession that is driving a generational low in reported happiness of adults between the ages of 18 and 34. More immediately troubling, the pandemic may be making things much worse. Economists Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine estimate that between 300,000 and 500,000 fewer babies will be born in 2021 than would have been if not for COVID-19.
While lots of work is done by demographers and social scientists to understand the raw numbers and their relationship to economic inputs and outputs, only one American social thinker, Mary Eberstadt, has plumbed the true depths of these trends in America, in her books How the West Really Lost God, Adam and Eve after the Pill, and Primal Screams. She shows how fatherlessness and the shrinking of kin networks have left America’s next generation angrier, unhappier, and socially maladapted. It was through the loyalties and dense networks of extended kin that most people in history found mentors, guides, consolations, economic opportunities, and access to potential mates and their own networks. Eberstadt also shows how plunging fertility rates are leading — not lagging — indicators of secularism, loss of adherence to national loyalties, and, ultimately, widespread social dysfunction.
It’s through their children that adult men and women renew their commitments to their faith in God, revivify their loyalty to their nation, and reconnect with the community around them. Japanification is the ultimate retreat from civilization. The monkeys and bears, the very forests themselves, will begin to reclaim territory as humanity retreats to a different kind of “man cave.” There mankind gawps at moving hieroglyphs of tentacles and red-eyed wolves, assuming an ironic pose of devotion to the biological life from which we futilely tried to secede.
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