Japan’s Underpopulation Crisis Led to Recent Election Upset Demographer Says
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
September 1, 2009
Tokyo, Japan (LifeNews.com) — The Japanese people made Sunday’s national elections a history one by making it so the ruling Liberal Democratic Party lost power for only the second time in the post-World War II era. A demographer says he thinks he knows the reason why: the nation’s underpopulation crisis.
In the elections, opposition Democrats swept to power by winning 308 of 480 seats in the lower house of parliament.
Barry McLerran, producer of both "Demographic Winter" and the just-released sequel, "Demographic Bomb," sent a statement to LifeNews.com to explain why.
He says that, lost in the election analysis, is the role declining birth rates and a rapidly aging population are playing in Japan’s ongoing economic crisis.
According to a story in today’s New York Times, "Many Japanese saw the vote as the final below to the island nation’s postwar order, which has been slowly unraveling since the economy collapsed in the early 1990s."
The economic collapse has seen Japan’s stock market fall 80 percent from its all-time high and its real estate market has lost 60 percent of its value.
So how does that relate to population and pro-life issues?
McLerran noted Japan has one of the 10 lowest birthrates in the world — 1.25 children per woman despite a birth rate of 2.13 needed to replace current population. Legalized abortion has contributed to the nation having too few people and underpopulation is resulting in other problems.
"The proportion of Japanese over 60 years of age went from 11.6% in 1989 to 21.2% today — the highest in the world," McLerran explains. "This impacts everything from the nation’s tax base to productivity and pensions."
"In the 1990s, the sun began to set on the Japanese economic miracle. But the worst is yet to come, as the nation desperately seeks solutions to its demographic crisis," he says.
Instead of prohibiting abortions, McLerran says Japan will try tactics used in Russia, where abortion has decimated its population, that have failed to work.
"The incoming government has announced it will pay a $270-per month subsidy to families for every child. Russia, which has a birth rate of 1.17, has been doing something similar for several years, without significant results," he says.
"Demographic Winter" describes the causes and consequences of plummeting birth rates worldwide, which are down more than 50% in the past 40 years due to massive legalization of abortion around the world.
"Demographic Bomb" focuses on the role demographic winter has played in the worldwide recession, as well as the contribution of the international population-control movement. It specifically discusses the role of demographics in Japan’s economic decline.
Related web sites:
"Demographic Winter" – https://www.demographicwinter.com
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