This in from France's Libération (or, as JMK prefers to refer to it, Délibération): demographic decline in Japan is advancing even more rapidly than previously feared. The land of the rising sun is the land of the setting sun, with the native population expected to drop from 128 million to less than 80 million by 2055. The main cause, according to the article, is a fertile generation that has turned into célébataires parasites -- unmarried parasites -- committed to a lifestyle of career and consumption while remaining under their parents' roof. (Translate the article here.)
If you don't yet know, Fruitful Reader, all this neatly validates Mark Steyn's thesis of America Alone -- that the West (and we include G-8 member Japan as the West), as a civilization, is dying. By not reproducing heartily, we are committing passive suicide. We don't notice the overall phenomenon here in the U.S. where modestly robust fertility rate is the norm, but the norm elsewhere -- and, curiously, especially in lands that knew the 20th Century's worst totalitarianisms: Japan, Russia, Germany -- is decline.
Going ... going ....
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Infantus japanesus - endangered species
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Literary asides: This validates, somewhat, the overriding concern of the Sea of Fertility series of novels, Japanese Yukio Mishima's ultimate writing project. The opening pages of the initial novel, Spring Snow, conjure the undescribable sadness of a photograph of the newly-modernizing Japanese army, a photograph taken during the Russo-Japanese War.... See also, German Heiner Müller's prose poem, "Explosion of a Memory (Description of a Picture)," for a storm of disturbing and absorbing images on many things including relations between the sexes and also death -- death, death, and more death.... Reading these works will make clear, Gentle Reader, in its own terribly roundabout way, how good most of us have it here in America.
