Way ahead of you
Ya ever just hear of an entire discourse you know nothing about
and then feel stuck between wanting to know more but also terrified of knowing more
So basically he felt the way to combat the declining birthrate was to work with anime studios to promote… uh people having kids. So then you basically have mecha vs. aliens anime except now add in a bunch of stuff like “it needs two pilots, an boy and a girl and the girl is bent over in front of the male pilot” and “the dystopian future has people with extended lifespans but no ability to procreate” etc.
So anyway, it’s a gross cishet propaganda piece with gross dude stuff on top of it, which only makes it about 10% more gross than most shonen but the fact that it’s govt. sponsored is sketchy as hell.
(Sorry yall this is something I’m interested in please feel free to skip)
Its all about the numbers y'all. Japans birth rate is currently at 1.43 per woman (2017) a 2.37% decrease from the year prior and declining steadily. Replacement levels for a population are at roughly 2.1 births per woman, and Japan has not met that goal since 1974.
They do not have enough children being born to prevent the population from decreasing and having an increasing number of elderly who require care from their last baby boom. New people aren’t being brought up or trained fast enough to fill their workforce or to care for the rapidly aging population.
PM Abe tried all sorts of wild shit, funding essentially hentai OVAs, providing baby funding, pushing a campaign of increased government child care resources that have largely fallen flat (they are already building up extensive waiting lists despite promises to provide free child care for every child in Japan in an effort to further incentive baby making).
Tokyo based firms began constructing marriage hunter apartments with stripper poles in the bathrooms to promote sexuality and try to encourage some baby making, to no avail.
Shinzo ‘Cum Inside’ Abe has ignored the actual problems with Japans corporate culture that require excessive overtime and dedication to the wellbeing of the company being completely at odds with cultivating any sort of social ties.
There’s no time, and when there is time there’s no energy left for child rearing. If there’s time and energy, their depressed wages ensure that there is no money and overcrowded city micro apartments mean there’s no space.
The sysyem is fundamentally broken and no amount of tax credits or free child care will make up for the implicit disincentivizations at a societal level for anything except working in your cubicle until you drop dead.
TL;DR
Shinzo Abe was very bad at acknowledging the actual flaws in society that make child rearing hard and drive down birth rates and thought he could fix it with tax credits and anime tiddies. Did not work.
How Shinzo Abe handled Japan’s birthrate decline reminds me a lot of the ads I see at bus stops in the US that try to remind poor people vegetables exist to get them to eat healthier while ignoring that poor people are well aware vegetables exist but don’t have access to fresh veggies because of food deserts, working too many hours to prep meals properly, fresh produce is expensive and spoilable when you work a lot for shit pay, etc.
