Housing costs skyrocketing due to Real estate Speculators in the 80's and then the economic crisis that resulted from that in the 90's and early 2000's I would think as a more recent factor in causing this situation, as not enough money to move out and live independently? Less likely to meet people or want to get into a relationship, especially with an entire generation having grown up under the mindset to be more frugal and minimalist.
I've seen the videos of people living in closets the size of a coffin as they can't afford anything else due to how expensive homes and apartments Still are due to shortages. There's no way you're going to raise a family like that.
But it's not like Business insider would see this and compare it to more recent times with the long-standing slander of millennial living post-economic recession, right?
A larger graph does kind of show the population decline they're citing, but There are a ton of other factors they're not taking into account; 1950-55 was the post-WW2 population boom which then settled down to previously-normal levels from the 1960's through the 1980's.
What started as a healthy 2.75 children per woman in the 1950s fell to 2.08 by 1960.
yeah, that was the beginning and end of the population boom. other countries saw a similar surge during that period. Baby boomers, anyone?
So this article is already contradicting their purported cause and effect behind their entire thesis, as something else was responsible for a massive growth rate that then went back down to normal. Their correlation of PM Yoshida's Economic policies to this thus doesn't add up.
I would figure bigger factors (on top of Japan's Lost Decade) would be stuff like women not being welcomed back or able to keep their job after getting pregnant due to the societal expectation of them then becoming full-time moms, or the stigma against Public displays of affection or signs of a relationship, popular media of the culture rarely having people hook up, the pressure to study in the years where teens would date to learn how to interact like that properly, the factors of depression and suicide culling the populace, or those insane hours being necessary to be able to support ones-self now which makes it so a single-income family can't support themselves all bigger influences.
Though having just come off a full 4-day weekend of having pulled double-shifts because of memorial day, that last one isn't exactly limited to Japan.
It's likely all of these and others compounding one-another into an ongoing mess, but I feel it's just...downright foolish to all pin it on just this one thing like this article is phrasing it as.