don't forget that in this case she too has an obligation to her country.

i believe china isn't a big problem anymore. i believe they aren't growing much for some years now because of their restrictions. the biggest problem is africa and india (and some other asian countries), they grow unbelievable fast, as more people there live as more people need help, waterproblems and things like that are horrible there and they still grow so fast...

one reason why people in developed countries don't get as many kids is because they don't need them anymore to care for them when they will be old. in the past, people got 10 kids because they "needed" them to help on the farm and to help them if they can't work anymore for themselve. there wasn't a annuity insurance in the past, if you didn't have kids and couldn't work, you couldn't live anymore.

and yes you are right and asbad as it sounds, more rights for woman means more demographic problems in developed countries. they want to start own careers now, no wonder many don't want to get some kids anymore because they wish to climb up the career ladder. it's good that they have these rights, but its bad for the demographic change in countries with a very low birth rate.

WTF?

How can you have no desire to have sex? There's something biologicaly off with you in order to think that since its a basic human insctinct. Say what you want about developed nations having a slower birth rate but its not because no one has sex, because they do its just now theres lots of birth control to avoid it and most people in developed nations don't want to have a lot of children..............but they still want to get laid.

No real surprises here. After all, dating sims. pretty much take out all need for social interaction.

I blame Nintendo for the death of Japan due to their scaremongering from dating sims!

I know i will get a lot of hate for this but I think it's because the Japanese youth watches too many western movies. They are brainwashed into thinking that only a tall blue eyed blonde is attractive. That, and also because they watch too much anime.

Honestly it could come down to it at some point. The trend is running that Japanese youth just don't want relationships, so state-mandated sperm donation (or just enforced breeding) would be the key

The problem with that is that having a child out of wedlock is still very much taboo in Japan. They have a system of family registration (called Koseki) which will essentially brand a bastard child for life, and if a woman gets divorced from her husband, any child she has up to 1 year later will still count as being part of his family. Liberalization of this system would be a start to getting people to have more sex.

The second issue is one more unique to Japan, that as the economy stagnates (which Japan has seen essentially zero growth since 1990), women still want to "marry up," and the inability of more people to find the stable kind of salaryman living means that a lot of men are simply taking for granted that they aren't going to be able to establish a relationship, and thus lose interest.

Part of it is simply the decline in family size issue that is across all developed countries, because Japanese women who do get married do have 2 kids on average, but the issue is so many are uninterested in marriage, and now it seems this has leeched across into the men as well.

That's an interesting take, considering the main article in this thread suggests that Japanese women are tired of these "sissy" men who aren't manly enough. That contradicts your post quite potently.

Perhaps it's that Japan is too bipolar in nature, for males. They're either shemales or have a male-superiority complex. :P

1) The governement or ministry of education could certainly find more subtle ways of encouraging young men and women to have sex if they decided it was a priority. On the other hand such a shift in state of mind is not something I'd expect to come easily from Japan.

2) That is completely wack!!

Hell I'd be terrified of marriage too with those kinds of laws!

3) This along with your previous points, together with the general tone of the OP suggests to me that there is a serious unbalance in the battle between the sexes in Japan. I'm not trying to imply anything chauvinistic here, but it seems like women there have such an upper hand that effectively it is causing a decline in birth rate.
The unpleasant truth is that the idea of women marrying early and giving birth to a large number of children goes together with the idea of sexual inequality in western culture...
That is a serious problem that is only going to get worse. Maybe Japan is just ahead of the rest of the developed world by a few years with this trend, like they are in technological development.

Interesting. And our society (American) says that video games are a bad influence on kids (lol).

Not really. Japan is still a pretty bad place to be if you're a woman. Even in terms of love, you actually get a more even sharing of the burden between men and women (valentines day being girls give to guys, with reciprocation only on White Day one month later). Otherwise they still face discrimination in a lot of stuff, and face more pressure to be married sooner. While it may be that the expectations of what Japanese women want out of their man has gotten out of hand on their part, things are still mostly tilted against them.

And the reason Japan has dropped behind other countries is because they haven't modernized for a system of free love and unconventional families. The Koseki system being the kicker here, it is believed if this system were changed such that the cultural stigma against unwed/divorced mothers went away, more children would be had. The funny part is that they *are* more liberal when it comes to marriage and divorce, or at least the whole process is easier. In both cases, go to your local bureaucracy, both put your seal on a form, pay a fee, and you're out.