The social fabric of Japan is indeed the problem. There are many posts here saying how taking vacations is being frowned upon and overworking being a problem, so much so there are people dying from too much work, they have a term called Karoshi for it.  Thousands of Japanese kids commit suicide due to school pressure and depression. Seems they need to collectively chill out. If they'd spend more time at home and less time commuting and busy with work, they'd consume more dedicated media, make babies etc.

"Professional women are stuck in the middle of that contradiction,".  "It's not just that day-care programs are scarce: Women who become pregnant or even just marry are so expected to quit work that they can come under enormous social pressure to do so and often find that career advancement becomes impossible. There's a word for married working women: oniyome, or 'devil wives.'"

That puts a squeeze on relational prospects for Japanese women. Fisher reports that women in their early 20s have a 25% chance of never marrying and a 40% chance of never having kids.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/half-of-japanese-people-arent-having-sex-2015-7?r=US&IR=T

http://europe.newsweek.com/why-do-so-many-japanese-schoolchildren-kill-themselves-336206?rm=eu

Crazy how half of Japan stopped having sex.

So your brother contributed to the decline by taking 1 human out of Japan!

And the 60% change of a kid or two!

Because Japan is the only country with taste, the rest are buying the ps4.

I agree with most of what you said (especially about the incredible pressure a working mother get - first hand experience) but I disagree on this one for the linguistic part. It annoys me a little bit, because that's the kind of misunderstanding going from a news to another, and becoming false fact.

Compared to English or French, the Japanese language uses less expressions and grammar, and much more words. These words are mostly formed by picking English words or assembling chinese characters together, for example taking 2 or 3 characters, mixing them, and thus creating a lot of new words, words that cover meanings we would use grammar and a few words to convey. Karoshi is just 過労死, the first caracter means excess, the second work, and the last death. That's not a brand new word, that's chinese caracters assemblated, and it takes about as much effort to create and remember than to say ""people dying from too much work". You add a bit of grammar in English, and this "word" tells literally "people dying from too much work". That's just the way Japanese language works. For example, there are a word to say "inside a car", "go back to your company", "non smoking place" or "nose bleeding". That does not means Japanese spend more time in a car, or suffer more from nose bleeding.

But indeed, karoshi is a problem in Japan.

Hey, there's a word for everything in Japanese. 

It cant be the women, Japanese women are quite pretty.

The Japanese look beyond superficial prettiness for actual substance, that's why they love the 3ds.

Based on guys in North America, they are quite primal in comparison then.. 

'Dem tits' and thats about it... lol 

Yes, but at least she is still on the same planet. Go figure. Actually, she could not find a husband in Japan, so she decided to go gaijin instead. But by marrying an outsider, she faces social pressure from family members. Japanese society is medieval in some ways.

Oh I agree that something like this would be caused by multiple factors. Nor do I personally think dating sims are primarily to blame, I was merely pointing out this observation as a way to tie in with this forum's primary focus, video games.