Japan’s demographic crisis is deepening faster than expected, with the number of births this year on track to fall below even the government’s most pessimistic projections.
Archived version: https://archive.is/20251228215131/https://slguardian.org/japans-birth-rate-set-to-break-even-the-bleakest-forecasts/
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
The birth rate discussion is mostly centered around “can we continue making money?”
Japan and Korea have low immigration rates, so the population falls and capital is unhappy about the prospect of a shrinking and more elderly workforce and domestic market to sell things to. Italy on the other hand has subsaharan and arabic immigration (and the actually larger eastern European and Chinese immigration - but they’re not as fantasy inducing for the far-right), so the population decline isn’t as fast. There are more workers to replace the dying ones, and capital is happy. Plus, you can use this fact to fuel chud paranoia about “the great replacement”
Immigrants are seen as a tool everywhere. Right wingers want us, only as long as we become loyal servants with 0 political power and living in fear of the state and society’s iron fist. Liberals want us, because “who will clean the toilets?”.
And the fact that something is happening to cause people to consider reproducing as outright harmful to their well-being among people who would otherwise have wanted offspring is a crisis of bourgeois society that few people actually want to talk about.