Japan has 127 million people living on an island. You're saying that if they bring it down to a more reasonable population that the country will collapse? You can still have prosperity with a slow decline in population. People are living in tiny cubes there, the cost of living is out of control and quality of life is declining. People are doing whatever they have to do to find work and employers are taking full advantage by dictating when they are allowed to have children. Employers are dictating when their employees can procreate. Think about that. And these people are letting them get away with it because there are so many people desperate for work. They need to reduce their population. Out of 235 countries, they're #39 for most dense population. They can definitely stand to reduce their numbers.

If you want more babies, you have to make it easier for women to have them. Japanese women pretty much get left to raise their kids on their own because the husbands are working such long hours. It's not a very inviting prospect, to be basically alone all the time and bringing up children.

It said “the earth,” not the economy. We’re guests here. We’re a virus.

@Id row. It's not about how many people overall are in Japan. Their economy is based on a certain amount of people active and working. The more the country depopulates or ages out, the more unstable the economy because the less people there will be to fill the jobs that are there. And the new generation of Japanese youth is less likely than their parents to become intensely loyal businessmen when they've discovered that 4-5 people working part-time can easily share an apartment while at the same time, spending most of their days playing video games. Sharing an apartment with so many people is not exactly the environment to raise kids...further pushing the population down. The older Japanese population is very concerned, as should be the rest of us since one country's collapsing economy can have a domino effect on other macro-economies.