Japan's fertility crisis is creating economic and social woes never seen before

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TorchWood
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Japan's fertility crisis is creating economic and social woes never seen before

Post by TorchWood »

From Business Insider:

'This is death to the family': Japan's fertility crisis is creating economic and social woes never seen before
It's midnight in Tokyo and Takehiro Onuki has just left the office, 16 hours after his shift began.

Onuki, a 31-year-old salesman, is headed to the train station to catch the 12:24 a.m. train, the last one of the night, back to his home in Yokohama. The train will quickly fill up with other professional working men.

At about 1:30 a.m., after having made a pit stop at a convenience store to grab a sandwich, Onuki arrives home. When he opens the bedroom door, he accidentally wakes his wife, Yoshiko, who just recently fell asleep after working an 11-hour day. She chides him for making too much noise and he apologizes.

Then, with his food still digesting and his alarm set for 7 a.m., he creeps into bed, ready to do it all again tomorrow.
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Re: Japan's fertility crisis is creating economic and social woes never seen before

Post by takenoko »

And I thought the 40 hour work week was bad. But Tokyo is probably a pretty expensive place to live. Surely Japan isn't full of workaholics.
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Re: Japan's fertility crisis is creating economic and social woes never seen before

Post by Lunagel »

Not everyone is a workaholic but I think a lot of people feel or are trapped by their jobs. It's pretty difficult to change jobs, especially past a certain age you're pretty much trapped there. It's very hard to transfer sideways or up, most of the time you have to start from the bottom again, meaning a pay/benefit cut.
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Re: Japan's fertility crisis is creating economic and social woes never seen before

Post by Catastrophe »

If this culture is built around it, it's going to take a generation or two before there is a social shift that allows relaxing of work hours.
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Re: Japan's fertility crisis is creating economic and social woes never seen before

Post by takenoko »

I mean, isn't there a contingency of NEET growing in Japan too?
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Re: Japan's fertility crisis is creating economic and social woes never seen before

Post by Catastrophe »

They need to find the middle ground on that one.

I spent some years working at the RIKEN Yokohama Kobe campus and the work expectation was bad. Like, in academic scientific research there is already this unwritten expectation of working late hours and on weekends, but this was on a whole other level. There was one woman who had two really bad mental breakdowns in the span of less than 12 months from a combination of stress and lack of sleep and nobody really seemed to give a shit.
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