Decoding the truth behind Elon Musk’s Japan will ‘cease to exist’ tweet

Elon Musk is back in the news. The billionaire behind Tesla invited angry reactions when he tweeted on 8 May that Japan would ‘cease to exist’ unless the country addresses its falling birth rate.

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.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 7, 2022

Tobias Harris, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, was perturbed at Musk’s decision to discuss the issue, as per a Reuters report. “What is even the point of tweeting this? The anxieties surrounding Japan’s demographic future is not that ‘Japan will eventually cease to exist’ but rather the profound social dislocations that are occurring as a result of the decline to a lower population level,” Harris told Reuters. Another Twitter user wrote, “Japan’s problem is their immigration policies, nothing more. Japan has been around for a few millennia. Won’t ‘cease to exist’ anytime soon.” Another user Cernovich tweeted: “Japan’s population has been the source of endless doomsday predictions, for decades, and yet the country is incredibly functional and advanced.” While Twitter kept arguing about Musk’s tweet, we take a look at what’s the full story here — the decline in Japan’s population, the reasons behind it and what the government is attempting to reverse this trend. Japan’s declining population A report by Kyodo News, Japan’s most prolific media outlet, stated that Japan’s population had its largest drop on record, falling by 644,000 to just over 125.5 million in 2021. The population stood at 125,502,000 as of 1 October, down 644,000 from a year earlier for the 11th consecutive year of decline. As per data, the number of foreign nationals living in Japan dropped by 25,000 to 2,722,000 following the strict border controls that were put in place to mitigate imported coronavirus cases. Japanese nationals totalled 122,780,000, a drop of 618,000 from a year earlier. While Japan saw 831,000 births in 2021, the number was outpaced by the year’s 1.44 million deaths. Japan has been facing a problem of a declining population; it peaked in 2008 and since then it has been seeing a downward trend. Japan had seen a record dip in the number of babies born in 2020. The Japanese government had then said that the number of births had fallen to 840,832 in 2020, down 2.8 per cent from a year earlier and the lowest since records began in 1899. Moreover, the total fertility rate (TFR), or the average number of children a woman is expected to give birth to in her lifetime, dropped to 1.34 in 2020, down 0.02 point from 2019, falling for the fifth straight year. Reasons for falling population There are numerous reasons for the shrinking population in Japan. First off, Japan is a “super-aged” nation, meaning more than 20 per cent of its population is older than 65. Another reason that could be behind the falling numbers is the low marriage rate in the country. In 2020, the number of marriages was just 525,490 — the lowest since the end of World War II. This figure was a 12.3 per cent dip from the previous year of 2019. Demographers feel that the low marriage rate in the country, which adversely affects the birth rate, is owing to the rise of unsteady employment. The Atlantic in a 2017 report had stated that Japan’s tradition of “regular employment,” had fallen drastically and given rise to ‘freeters’. These freeters, as per _The Atlanti_c report, didn’t have stable jobs for their whole careers, and instead pieced together temporary and part-time jobs with low salaries and no benefits, making them less desirable marriage partners. Similarly, women in Japan also frequently find themselves in ‘irregular jobs’ too, which also has implications for raising a family, because the hours are unpredictable and the pay is low. The country also has one of the highest life expectancies in the world, leading it to face a steep decline at one end of the lifecycle and a boom at the other. Its population is forecast to fall to about 83 million by 2100, with 35 per cent of Japanese aged over 65, according to the United Nations. Trying to change the trend Successive Japanese governments have launched several major initiatives since the 1990s to tackle the problem, including the Angel Plan, the New Angel Plan and the Plus One Policy. In 1994, the government had launched the Angel Plan and then the New Angel Plan in 1999. Both of these were designed to make having children an easier and more attractive option The other one, the Plus One Proposal, was intended to encourage families to grow by “plus one”. It aimed to create parent-friendly working conditions, with funds allocated for the construction of 50,000 new day-care facilities. In 2020, the Japanese government announced that it would boost the tumbling birth rate by funding artificial intelligence matchmaking schemes to help residents find love. The government has also relaxed the country’s strict rules on immigration, although plans to admit up to half a million blue-collar workers by 2025 to address serious labour shortages have been frustrated by the coronavirus pandemic. With inputs from agencies Read all the Latest News , Trending News ,  Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.