national eugenics lesson.

(very distracted, stream of consciousness entry, ご注意下さい.)

I'm back. Later on, I'll put up some of my Tokyo photos and tell some of my Tokyo stories later. Right now, I'm all in a tizzy about another tv show, again a show directed at telling children how they ought to be. This time, the show is aimed squarely at children, and concerns population control. Japan's birth rate per adult couple is 1.209. This show is about why that is a problem, and how it can be changed.
The story/lie they're telling is that the nation of Japan will cease to exist in the first half of the next millennium if they don't bring up the birth rate. I'll talk about that a little more later. After a semi-mathematical explanation about geometric progressions, they took a trip to the zoo to talk about the birth rate of other animals, which was pretty irrelevant.

Next it's time for a trip to Denmark, where they have brought their birth rate up in the last years. I think they hit the mark actually (mostly) when they say that in essence most Japanese houses are single parent households because Japanese fathers take no responsibility for child-rearing. They blame that on the father's laziness, and the adherence to traditional roles, but really gloss over the amount of time spent at work. A Japanese worker spends nearly twice as much time at work as a Dane. Danish couples are also infinitely more likely to both work, even in the upper classes. but enough of that.

Why do you teach this stuff to kids? Well, the example I gave above was actually not just a pointless extrapolation. A huge number of Japanese people think that Japan needs to keep it's birthrate up, or Japan will cease to exist (in Japanese the same as the polite word for die). Despite being one of the economically, culturally and technologically strongest countries in the world, Japan preserves the idea that they are a society of the brink of extinction. I can't help but laugh at the idea, but something does occur to me.
Japan does not keen to the idea of integrating their society with others at all. In their model for the future of Japan it's no accident that immigration is not included. A Japan that is not overwhelmingly ethnically Japanese is no Japan at all in the eyes of many people. Whereas the other countries seeing declining birthrates have in many cases welcomed an increase in immigration, Japan has not.
This is a chicken and egg suggestion, but maybe japan's historical antipathy toward it's neighbors is partly to blame as well. Where Germany doesn't view its society as all that separate from France doesn't view it's society as all that different from England, Japan has preserved a sense of racial and cultural superiority toward it's neighbors. Of course Germany and Japan both had really catastrophic flare ups of nationalism in last century, though I take those both mostly as historically isolated incidents. The broader sweep is that Japan has not had a shared culture with it's neighbors for a very long time, whereas christianity, philosophical and political movements, and even weather have bound the european countries very tightly.
That is to say that Japan is an island country and not just physically. After ww2, it's especially difficult for Japan to form strong ties with it's neighbors, but as time goes on, birthrate and immigration are another reason it will have to.