TST 3/6/23 - Land of the Rising Sun, Declining Population

Tokyo, Japan, is always used as an advertisement for overpopulation, or the idea that we are running out of resources and space to expand as a species. With 14 million people direct, and 37 million estimated indirect - around Tokyo - it would seem to certainly be a case of overpopulation. However, Japan has been grappling with population decline for years. The most recent numbers show twice as many people dying than are being born - 1.58 million to 800,000 roughly. In fact, Japan’s population has been falling from its peak of 128 million in 2008 to now 124.6 million. But Tokyo, like many cities, is actually overcrowded, since more than a third of the entire population lives in the general vicinity. How can Tokyo be a sign of overpopulation in a country with one of the lowest birth rates in the world; so bad, in fact, that the country is in a state of emergency, according to the Prime Minister. This is coupled with an older generation, still one of the healthiest in the world, which is dying. The government is even soon to be paying people to leave Tokyo. History shows that after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, and Imperial Japan’s defeat in WWII, centuries of Shi-kata and Kai Zen boosted the country into economic and cultural superiority as it opened to the rest of the world. Now it seems that Japan’s population is not the only thing declining, as its culture, language, and history is sold off and cheapened. This makes Japan the blueprint for the new world, a sophisticated culture, as with ancient China, opened to expansion by powerful forces that effectively eliminate the power of people and tradition in place of collective ideology. The irony is, Japan has a collectivist mindset but it is different than the authoritarian mindset of other countries.

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