On May 8, 2022, Musk suddenly posted a tweet that looked a bit confusing:
At risk of stating the obvious, unless something changes to cause the birth rate to exceed the death rate, Japan will eventually cease to exist. This would be a great loss for the world.
Unless something changes occur to reverse the birth rate exceeding the death rate, Japan will eventually cease to exist, which will be a huge loss for the whole world.
Many media around the world have also hyped up Japan's population problem again because Musk published such a tweet, and the flower grower has turned over the tweet and the ins and outs of this incident, in fact, the question of when Japan will no longer be there has been calculated by Japanese scientists a few years ago!
The ins and outs of musk's tweeting incident
On May 8, a Twitter account with an ID of @WholeMarsBlog suddenly dug up a grave and forwarded a press release on The Japanese population data published by Japan's Kyodo News Agency on April 15:
Japan's population falls by record 644,000 to 125.5 mil. in 2021
In 2021, Japan's population fell by a record 644,000 to 125.5 million
Several key figures are listed:
831,000 births in Japan in 2021;
But the death toll in 202 was 1.44 million;
The gap has reached more than 600,000, which means that the Population of Japan has not only not increased by one person in 2021, but has decreased by 600,000, which is really shocking, but the more shocking data is still to come:
The working population aged 15 to 64 fell by 584,000 to 74,504,000, or 59.4 percent of the total population, a record low.
People aged 14 and under made up a record low of 11.8 percent of the population, while people aged 65 and over made up a record high of 28.9 percent of the population.
Two keys: one is negative population growth, and the other is an aging population, which is a serious problem that could push Japan into a doomed place in the future.
The account with the ID of WholeMarsBlog @ Musk's ID: elonmusk at the time of publication, so Musk expressed his lament about Japan's population decline on the content of this news.
It is estimated that Musk did not expect that his few words would cause such a response, of course, this man who owns SpaceX and Tesla and StarLink and some high-tech companies such as Twitter, every move will cause great media attention, but Musk is really right, because on the issue of Japanese population, Japanese scientists have already made judgments.
When Japan will disappear: Japanese scientists have already calculated
In September 2016, researchers at Tohoku University in Japan released a shocking data on their official website, August 16, 3776, which is the date of japan's extinction!
The reason is simple, over the past 25 years, Japan's fertility rate has been declining, according to the average rate of decline over the years, again
According to this ratio, Japan's child population will be zeroed on August 16, 3776, and the countdown to Japan will begin!
Of course, this day is not the Japanese population zero, but the child population zero, it is obvious that there is no future without children, the age of survival of the remaining population can be calculated, no more than 100 years old, that is to say, before 3900, the Japanese population will all die, the day of the real zero will come.
Why don't Japanese people have children?
The reasons are quite complicated,
Northeastern University economists Hiroshi Yoshida and Masahiro Ishigaki did a study between 2014 and 2015:
In April 2014, there were 16.32 million children in Japan, but by the second year that number had dropped to 16.17 million, and data was found in another survey: The Japan Fertility Association had a 2016 survey showing that 49.3% of respondents aged 18 to 49 said they had not had sex in the past month, an increase of 10% over the figure two years ago.
In addition, as early as 2011, a survey found that 61% and 49% of unmarried men aged 18 to 34 had no boyfriend and girlfriend.
Although from the perspective of causality, the sexual behavior of boyfriends and girlfriends and young people is not directly related to the population, it shows a shocking fact that Japanese people have begun to move towards a state of no desire and no demand in terms of primitive sexual impulses, which means that Japan's desireless society is rapidly arriving.
A set of data released by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare on December 22, 2017 shows that Japan has fallen into a low-desire society! The definition of a "low-desire society" by the famous Japanese management scientist Kenichi Omae is:
No matter how prices are reduced, consumer desire cannot be stimulated; the economy has not grown significantly, bank credit interest rates have been repeatedly lowered, and the number of buyers before the age of 30 is still declining year by year; young people have lost their materialistic desires and desire for success, and they scoff at cars and luxury goods; the "home" culture prevails, and three meals a day are simple because of ugliness.
The low birthrate is severe, the population is rapidly decreasing, the proportion of unmarried people has increased, and the proportion of unmarried people is as high as 25% for men and 14.3% for women.
This problem is not generally serious, it will lead to severe deflation, because what is produced is not consumed, and in a way, deflation may be even worse than inflation, and this is happening in Japan at present.
"Tamako who does not seek progress" is such a work, which is the work of Japanese young director Atsuhiro Yamashita, the purpose is to expose the life of the young people who have no desires and no needs, and there is a post-viewing feeling about this film on the zhihu, watching Sakai Yukiko waste wood all day long to escape the daily life of the real society, exuding the atmosphere of "widowed daughter", and the heroine of the sunshine inspirational positive energy are completely two concepts.
Originally, Yamashita Atsuhiro's purpose was to expose the practices of decadent young people in modern Japanese society, but unexpectedly, this movie was not a big hit in Japan, and many young people who watched this movie also learned Tamako's approach, and they lost their self-motivation, which was really what director Atsuhiro Yamashita said did not expect.
The BBC FUTURE reported on 29 January 2019, "The plight of Japan's modern hermits", which described it as follows:
In Japan, more than 500,000 people live the life of a modern hermit. They are called
hikikomori
- Hermits, who quit all social activities and often do not leave home for many years at a time. A government survey found about 541,000 people (1.57 percent of the population), but many Japanese experts believe that number is grossly underestimated.
As early as 2016, Kenichi Omae, a well-known Management Scientist in Japan, warned that in the long run, it may have a great negative impact on the Japanese economy.
Of course, the most fundamental reason is that Japan's economic development has almost stagnated since 1990, and the above figure shows the change in Japan's economic development level in the past 30 years (1980-2010), and 1991 is the starting point of its stagnation. In the past decade, Japanese politicians have repeatedly discussed how to stimulate consumer demand, including getting rid of deflation, active depreciation of the yen, quantitative easing, etc., but the results are minimal, and Japanese society is falling into a quagmire of no return.
Of course, what is more frightening is that since the epidemic in 2020, this problem will only become more serious, such as the population data since 2021 is one of its performances, Musk has such a comment is actually expected, if there is a friend AT I comment, it is estimated that this is probably the meaning, but the comments of the flower grower may not attract everyone's attention so much.
Extended reading: Japanese grandpa who worked to the death
How serious is Japan's aging? Japan has a total population of more than 100 million, but 28% are over 65 years old, while the legal retirement age in Japan is 60 years old, and you can imagine that more than 35% of people are preparing to retire or are in the process of retiring.
Due to the shortage of labor, these people are still working, and even funnier is that the members of the underworld Yamaguchi group, more than 40% of the people over 50 years old, the 50-year-old, how, is not very soul-destroying!
According to an article published on October 17, 2016 by the Japan Foreign Press Center (FPCJ), "Issues with Seniors in Japan," the number of elderly people arrested for crimes in 2014 was 47,252, about four times the number of people arrested in 1995, which means that the japanese elderly in 2014 did not live as well as in 1995, otherwise why would they go to crime?
On December 14, 2021, an accident occurred at a ready-mixed concrete manufacturing company in Minamitahara-cho, Ikoma City, Nara Prefecture, Japan, where two workers in their 70s were buried alive in a concrete silo, but they were installing steel ladders inside the silo, Asahi Shimbun reported. Two of the dead, one 70 and one 78, were hired by the concrete mixing company to work on welding ladders.
According to the data released by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare in November 2013, the social security premium in Japan reached 26.4 trillion yen in 2012, exceeding the tax balance of 25.7 trillion yen, the deficit reached 1 trillion yen, the whole social economy pension is not enough, many elderly people have to come back to work after retirement, due to labor shortage, Japanese people over the age of 75 are still engaged in manual labor, so the problems faced by the Japanese government are still quite serious.