Japan Births Fall To Lowest in 125 Years 190
The number of babies born in Japan last year fell to the lowest level since records began 125 years ago as the country's demographic crisis deepens and government efforts to reverse the decline continue to fail. Financial Times [non-paywalled source]: Japan recorded 720,988 births in 2024, according to preliminary government figures published on Thursday. The number has declined for nine straight years and appears to be largely unaffected by financial and other government incentives for married couples to produce more children.
The high culture decadence effect. (Score:5, Interesting)
Curiously it's efficiency that has us have less children. Because we grow older and we have such an abundance, that we are easily distracted from fundamental animalistic instincts, such as horniness, reproduction, pair-bonding and duty towards family and kin.
Children used to be cheap labor, now they are ultra-expensive pets. That's a recipe for population decline.
There are ancient cultures of which we know that went the same way. They became so aloof that they didn't reproduce anymore and died out pretty quickly at their peak development.
This is why these days people stuck in a primitive bronze age revelation cult that emphasizes booking women on the mother-role and having them push out babies in rapid succession is more superior in their survival strategy than western society. Hence the takeover of Europe by 1sl4m.
Nature finds a way (Score:2)
The old argument that cult membership is a viable survival strategy. You're (probably) not wrong. Natural selection could be picking breeders that are more easily influenced by cults. Really anyone is susceptible to them, but people who have learning disabilities, emotional trauma, or addiction can end up in a cult more often than people without these challenges.
Re: (Score:3)
Islam is more memetic selection, the women don't have a choice, even in the west getting out is actually dangerous (moreso Europe than the US).
The breeder cults inside western civilization with more freedom to leave than Islam have the best natural selection for genetically instinctual breeders, precisely because people can bow out without fear of being hunted down by relatives. Mennonite, Amish, orthodox jews, all more naturally selected breeders than Muslims.
Re: (Score:2)
Did you just say the Amish way of life is better than neoliberalism?
RIP Boomer libs (Score:2)
A point against neoliberalism is they apparently suck at fighting fascists and Nazis. Maybe it's a political philosophy that doesn't deserve to carry on to the next generation.
Re: (Score:3)
There are ancient cultures of which we know that went the same way. They became so aloof that they didn't reproduce anymore and died out pretty quickly at their peak development.
I've never once heard of this. Which historic cultures are you specifical referring to?
Hence the takeover of Europe by 1sl4m.
Ohhhh, I get it. You live in far right fantasy land.
Re: The high culture decadence effect. (Score:2)
Re:The high culture decadence effect. (Score:5, Interesting)
When at the very least 2% of your population, and more likely closer to 10%, nope out of the whole making babies thing, that is going to have a significant long term downward spiral.
In evolutionary terms, that's only the case if those nopeing out are female. If they're male, that doesn't affect reproduction rates at all unless society strictly enforces absolute monogamy. If it doesn't, then a single male willing to make babies can easily impregnate hundreds of females.
The question really is one of figuring out why women, specifically, don't want to become mothers. Once those reasons are clearly understood and put on the table, directly fixing each one of those. And from what I've read and watched on the topic, it all boils down to four factors, in order of precedence: MONEY, career, prestige, time.
Hence, pay women to have babies (and pay them A LOT, more than it costs to rise the child); make it sure having babies, whether it's one or ten, won't negatively impact their careers in any way whatsoever; make extraordinarily prestigious for them to have as many babies as they can, mothers being absolute celebrities commemorated all around, including publicly, for their feats; and make it sure they'll have time to do everything they want by providing, for free, everything needed, from day care to doctor visits to babysitters to literally everything.
That's it. It's neither hard not complicated.
Re: (Score:2)
So if every male "nopes" out of reproduction, how are these women getting pregnant? That's an extreme example, but it demonstrates that it still takes a man and a woman to get
Re: (Score:3)
So if every male "nopes" out of reproduction
I'm talking about the real world. In it, "all of" anything doing the same thing is, for all practical purposes, a non-occurrence. Every natural event has a distribution, typically Gaussian in shape though on occasion other shapes appear. The focus must be on the entire curve, with an emphasis on the average and its surrounding.
Most women prefer to be in a relationship
Only later in life. In their 20s the vast majority prefer to have hookups with very attractive men. Again, this is the average and the surrounding distribution, the long tails don't m
Re: (Score:3)
I admitted my point was a thought experiment to prove that men opting not to have children absolutely will have an effect on birth rates. It was an absurdism used to prove my point just as your comment about a single male in modern times fathering hundreds children (although Elon is certainly trying).
Re: The high culture decadence effect. (Score:2)
have you spent time in any urban setting at all recently?
I know plenty of women that already just pop out babies to be able to get the government benefit. They just sit at home and do nothing. They do not contribute to society, and they make a very bleak future for their herd of children.
Re: (Score:3)
They just sit at home and do nothing.
They aren't doing nothing, they're making babies. Most of those will pay taxes in the future. The amount of taxes they'll pay over their entire lifetimes is much higher than the cost of keeping those mothers at home doing nothing. From a purely economic perspective that's a net win.
Re: (Score:2)
How do you think having ten children won't negatively impact one's career?
https://www.bps.org.uk/psychol... [bps.org.uk]
Re: The high culture decadence effect. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And if we just shot anybody that does not have children by 30, that would also have an effect.
Are you a fascist or what?
This is a good thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Endless growth is impossible
We need steady-state sustainability
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Nor are we anywhere near the likely maximum population for humans https://www.science.org.au/curious/earth-environment/how-many-people-can-earth-actually-support [science.org.au] .
I am curious as to how you came to this conclusion. The article you cited here, as an aside to the included graph/image, states "The majority of studies estimate that the Earth's capacity is at or beneath 8 billion people." The current population of the earth, from a quick Google search, is slightly in excess of 8 billion people.
I can see maybe 10 billion supported by earth with some changes to lifestyles and resource management. I have read the "it's all about energy" arguments and there are some me
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, so? Populations that are too large have to go down to reach a steady state. That is really basic math.
As to "maximum", that is not optimal in any way. That is _maximal_ and comes with a host of unnecessary problems. Some of them may even be deadly, like climate change.
Seriously, where did you find this propaganda crap?
Re: (Score:2)
Why would you want more people?
Less people means you get to keep a lifestyle without sacrificing much because fewer people means automatically less carbon emissions by definition.
It also means lowered demand on housing aka, cheaper housing whether you rent or buy.
It's also less people on the roads, so less time stuck in traffic jams.
It's less people competing for jobs.
Just think in just over a century the world population quadrupled from around 2 billion people at the turn of the 20th century to 8 billion t
Re: (Score:2)
Less people means you get to keep a lifestyle without sacrificing much because fewer people means automatically less carbon emissions by definition.
No such definition at all. A large population can produce a lot of CO2 and a small population can produce a small amount. Structure matters more.
It also means lowered demand on housing aka, cheaper housing whether you rent or buy.
High housing costs are due to high regulatory burdens; things like stricter zoning and building codes, severe minimum area requirements, and massive amount of permitting. It is borderline horrific to let government overregulation of housing be seen as something that should be remedied by having fewer people.
It's also less people on the roads, so less time stuck in traffic jams.
Fewer people means more cost to those roads per a person a
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, so? Populations that are too large have to go down to reach a steady state. That is really basic math.
The population isn't declining due to it being too large. Populations in these areas are declining because people are choosing not to have kids or delaying having kids until it is too late.
As to "maximum", that is not optimal in any way.
The goal here isn't push the human population to the max. The point is that if we're not near the max, then it is very hard to argue that there's too much population.
Seriously, where did you find this propaganda crap?
Maybe respond to the substantial points people make rather than just labeling things you disagree with as propaganda?
Re: (Score:2)
Japan's birthrate won't bring sustainability.
Re: (Score:2)
At the current rate of decreasing population, when will Japan have a serious under-population problem?
A few decades. The problem is retired people require working people to make the things and provide the services they require to live.
Note this is distinct from how their retirement is paid. Whether it's a savings method, or a shared system, or whatever, that number in the bank still represents a specific share of things available for purchase and services available for hire. If the offer of those things reduces due to there being less people available doing them, that share falls, which at the individual le
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
When will it become a problem? Arguably, Japan has been overpopulated since the 1940s. At the current rate of decreasing population, when will Japan have a serious under-population problem? A century from now?
Possibly never. Birth rates typically recover when a sane population density is reached.
Re: (Score:2)
It's already a problem:
https://futuristspeaker.com/fu... [futuristspeaker.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
100% this.
I have heard the arguments (FUD ?) around population decline. Usually this boils down to something like..."Who is going to pay for my social security check and take care of me when I'm really old"
Valid concerns, but are separate from the 'how many people can/should the planet sustain". My position is that we are already over-capacity as evidenced by the worsening climate, environment, and human condition. I don't have a researched answer for what the optimal population the earth can support, b
Re: (Score:2)
Fuck that, I want to persist. My thousand generations of fore-bearers didn't get this far so I could just roll over and watch netflix and be gone. Do I love my kids on a personal level? Obviously OBVIOUSLY! I want to see them live good lives, and then pass it on down. That's living.
I know there will still
Cities (Score:3)
They have professionals to push more people into subway cars while you can get a fixer-upper home in the country with a decent amount of property with well and septic for $30K. Good electrical service and everything. One I looked at was a spitting image of the Totoro house.
For some reason the culture drives their people to live in pods instead of living naturally. Why?
It's not at all surprising that such living conditions lower the breeding rate - all mammals do the same.
Re:Cities (Score:4, Interesting)
I am reminded of the rat utopia experiments though. At a certain point that rats which were effectively put into something akin to a dense urban area suffered a massive population collapse. The GTA (Greater Tokyo Area) is one of the largest and densest metro areas on the planet. Averaged across the entire metro area it's less than 400 m^2 per person and the reality is that many of the people are far more cramped for space than that. It's not surprising that people wouldn't want to add more people into such constricted conditions. Not that it matters when there are plenty of people from outside of the city desperate for whatever opportunity they think it may offer who will gladly move in faster than the current occupants will leave or die.
Re: (Score:2)
A subsidized lifestyle [youtube.com] isn't "living naturally."
Will this impact the manga/anime industry? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
It means more outsourcing production to other countries. With South Korea experiencing similar problems, expect some offices in Singapore or wherever to be handling a lot of that work.
Also the CN/Singapore axis has been taking over a lot of game and anime production which will lead to a shift away from Japan. Witness what happened to the studio that did the latest Mana game: they got fired after release, with the reason being that the publisher wanted to get away from Japan-specific properties:
https://www [reddit.com]
Re: (Score:2)
I imagine generative AI is advancing much faster than the decline in quantity of artists. In a few years you could likely feed an action manga to such a system and have it output a full anime with the quality level of a Solo Leveling or a Ghibli movie. If not both, plus an old-style 1980s version, so you can watch whatever version you prefer.
It's Not (Just) About the Money (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's Not (Just) About the Money (Score:4, Interesting)
This is exactly my experience. Felt like i wasn't dad material. Dated a single mom and she was a cunt but raising her kids felt surprisingly right and wasn't the horrid inconvenience that a lot of parents act like.
Told myself I'll have kids when i find the right woman and we're secure enough to raise and launch them into the middle class and then when all that happened we were tired and in our 40s and the future we"d raise them into seemed uncertain.
It just couldn't happen responsibly so it didn't happen. Probably could have but my own boomer parents were irresponsible and despite wealth, mostly left us to fend for ourselves.
Re: (Score:2)
Norway offers about a year for each parent and their birth rates are still declining significantly since 2009.
Blame the adults (Score:5, Interesting)
This is all the fault of selfish young adults. The more women are educated and able to work and pay for their own lifestyles, the less they want to become moms, which is a very specific and limited role. Why do that when they can live how they like, travel, buy luxury goods if they want and generally live comfortably.
Japanese men, on the other hand, don't particularly want to deal with women who don't exactly need men and don't want to get married any more than the women. Like single women, single working men are free to indulge their hobbies and games or whatever else they want to do. The have jobs sufficient to fund it.
For both sides, getting married and having kids represents a loss of income, but even worse, they lose tremendous amounts of freedom as they are forced into extremely narrow roles for mothers and fathers. Moms will be expected to do all the childcare and keep house and home, while the dads are expected to work ridiculous hours and turn over almost all their income to the wife. She becomes a housewife mom robot. He becomes a work robot. And that's IT.
These are smart people. They see how they were raised. They see what will be expected of them and want nothing to do with it. They are the generation that can say NO.
The government talks big about meaningless changes that do nothing at all to address why young adults are not having kids. They don't want to make the real changes it would take to fix the problem. At this point, the only way to save the population would be to outlaw not having kids.
Re: (Score:2)
This post is highly accurate.
Re: (Score:3)
Yep. Having children needs to have less effect on your life, which means providing a better life to EVERYONE.
Japan has the potential productivity to do that, they do not have the cultural will. Then again, nobody else seems to either, it's just Japan's among the worst at it.
I bet if work meant 35 hour weeks and 4 weeks a year vacation, and children meant a year of paid family leave (for both parents) followed by free before & after care while the parents work, and free sports programs for older childr
Re: Blame the adults (Score:2)
Lowest in 125 years? (Score:2)
Wouldn't the birth rate have been lower during the war, when most of the men were away with the army and navy conquering China, and the Pacific.
(Sure there would be offspring in those countries where the soldiers had raped chinese and Korean women etc, but they wouldn't have counted..)
We have tried nothing... (Score:5, Insightful)
... and we are all out of ideas.
Creating enough childcare places? No, hasn't happened.
Free healthcare for children? No.
Mandatory parental leave? No.
Help with insane housing cost? Not really. But you can get a few free diapers.
Honest, it looks to me as if Japan does not want to solve the problem.
They're trying to have the cake and eat it too (Score:3)
But the fact of the matter is women who work full time have fewer children. Especially in countries with ridiculous demands for working hours like Japan and America (fun fact Americans now work more hours than the Japanese).
They basically spent the last 20 years trying to fig
Re: (Score:3)
Help with insane housing cost? Not really. But you can get a few free diapers.
OK you have no clue what things are actually like in Japan. You should turn your mouth off, and turn your brain on.
Wrong problem, as usual (Score:2)
As usual in this sort of thread, people start going on about the lack of babies. The demographic problem, the economy problem, the environment problems in the developed countries is the surplus of older people.
Start offering retirement as a lump sum at age 50, followed by a "died peacefully in their sleep" on a random date before age 52 and there won't be a shortage of babies any more.
No surprise (Score:2)
My Japan Experience (Score:3)
I was on holiday a couple of years ago with my family in Kyoto.
We were up early on a Saturday morning and the city streets were deserted, until we came across this huge line up of 98% under 30's men.
Hundreds and hundreds with a few guys in white uniforms and bullhorns organising them.
We couldn't work out what the building was they were lining up to get into... but when we came back past an hour later we found out it was a huge gambling parlour.
Japan's a strange place!
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
What if I would be such a bad parent my kids would all end up school shooters? Why not just replace me with a Mormon?
Re: (Score:2)
Eh? Care to explain the joke? Or whatever if not a joke.
Wild guess: No, I'm not saying that day care is bad or that the people who provide day care are bad people. But it's a bandage, not a real solution. I'm just saying that the problem is fake because most people want to have kids and if the system is discouraging them from having kids there is something wrong and it needs more than a bandage or two.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure most people do want to have kids.
I have three adult kids and I'm fairly confident none of them wants to have a kid. And this is pretty common amongst people their age (20s-30s) from what I see.
Having a kid is a whole lot of largely-unrewarding work. The regret rate for having kids is estimated at anywhere from 10 to 14 percent [www.cbc.ca], a non-trivial number.
FWIW, I do not regret having kids. However, if my choices had been different, I don't think I would have regretted not having kids either.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The real solution is to transfer some dare-I-say tax money from people without children to people with children
It's simpler than that. Economist Robin Hanson calculated that the cost of rising a kid is much less than the total taxes they'll pay once they enter the workforce, so all this requires is paying parents now the full cost of rising children, plus a surplus to incentivize them even more, using a share of future tax revenue, via government bonds or whatever, to pay for that. It's a wholly self-sustaining method.
Too bad politicians are mathematically illiterate and wouldn't start understanding the half of it.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not quite disagreeing, but it sounds like you are arguing for borrowing the money and I see it more as a mandatory long-term investment thing. But I don't think it would have to be a lot of money to tilt the scales up to sustainability because most people do want to have kids. Sort of hard-wired that way.
Re: (Score:2)
it sounds like you are arguing for borrowing the money
At the end of the day, it doesn't make much of a difference how one calculates it. The practical effect is that future production of goods and services increase, which will pay off present-day expenditures even when considering time discounts. Hence, whether one looks at is as borrowing money, or investing, the result is the same.
Different amounts, considered as a percentage of the cost of rising a kid from pre-birth medical exams all the way to them coming out of university, is going to influence how many
Re: (Score:2)
It wouldn't actually change how much they cost; but a cost borne by someone else feels almost as good as a subsidy; so seeing the number totted up and paid out would cause some serious freaking out, both among those reflexively averse to expenditure and among those who think that labor is something you get fo
Re: (Score:3)
I hope you're joking because replaced by what? They still aren't letting meaningful numbers of immigrants in which is why their population is shrinking. No one is getting replaced, their total population is just getting smaller.
Plus it's not like anyone is sterilizing them or anything.
Re: Replacement (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You seem to have some psychosis there. Better get that looked at.
Not "Replacement" (Score:2)
Japan has 3.4 million foreigners in the country. [ref [kyodonews.net]] The population of Japan is 124.9 million people, so foreign workers are 2.7% of the population of Japan. Doesn't sound like "replacement" is imminent.
The link you gave says that they might add visas for 0.82 million foreign workers over five years, so raise that to 3.3% of the population by 2030. Still doesn't sound like "replacement."
Re: (Score:2)
Death rate/demographic structure of Japan means population collapse in a few decades. We're talking less than 10% of Japanese left in Japan if current trends persist by the end of century.
Whereas demographics they're importing reproduce. Therefore whoever they import and keep will be the masters of the islands, and considering how violent and ethnosupremacist those people tend to be it will likely happen during lifetimes of some of the people alive today.
Re: (Score:2)
Right, because someone from a third world country could never run things based on a schedule.
Also, last I checked Japan's population was still shrinking and by a lot. Get back to me when that's not the case.
Re: (Score:2)
>Right, because someone from a third world country could never run things based on a schedule.
Read up on how train schedules are in Japan. Find me a comparable third world nation.
If you cannot, you have falsified your claim.
Considering your second statement literally attempts to gaslight people into believing I denied Japanese population issues, I'm not going to hold my breath on your admitting that.
Re: (Score:2)
Read up on how train schedules are in Japan. Find me a comparable third world nation.
People from the third world are capable of learning new things just like the rest of us. The Japanese running their rail network certainly had to as a doubt the average Japanese person could just step in and run a train network.
If you cannot, you have falsified your claim.
No, you're just being ridiculous.
Considering your second statement literally attempts to gaslight people into believing I denied Japanese population issues, I'm not going to hold my breath on your admitting that.
Your post as a response to my own and in the context of the greater conversation could easily be construed as you suggesting the above's population replacement claim was correct. If I got that wrong then my apologies.
I also don't care if you don't see
Re: (Score:2)
>People from the third world are capable of learning new things just like the rest of us. The Japanese running their rail network certainly had to as a doubt the average Japanese person could just step in and run a train network.
Reality check: Most people from Somalia struggle with basic time keeping several generations after moving to European nations. You can observe same problem in Africa itself, and it has been observed by basically every outsider moving in to do business across the continent. Pakist
Re:Axolotl Tanks (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Axolotl Tanks (Score:5, Insightful)
...the nightmare of spending the next 18+ years raising the kid.
What nightmare?? My daughter is 21 and in her final year at University and she still needs some help from Mum and Dad and that is just fine. When I look back over the last 21 years, I can agree that there were a few times where my daughter was rather annoying, but they are a tiny minority. The great majority of the time my wife and I spent raising her was the most enormous and infinitely rewarding fun!
Now, we are comfortably middle class and can afford a nice house with a big garden (yard) so perhaps I shouldn't judge the situation of other people who might find things more difficult, but here is what I wonder. If you go to an old people's home and ask the residents whether they have any regrets about having their children, what will most of them say? "Gosh, I wish I'd skipped the whole nightmare!"? Perhaps not. What will it be like in old people's homes in places like Korea and Japan in 50 years time? Will some residents have children and grand-children to visit them whilst the majority don't have anyone? How will the childless group feel? Will they have regrets?
Re: (Score:3)
That's the wrong question. Of course someone wh
Re: (Score:2)
I'd take that bet. There are plenty of people out there who wanted children, but for various reasons could not, such as infertility or whatever.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What are you talking about I know a few, yes they are old but definitely regret not having children. And if you want something more substantial than anecdotal evidence although that is enough to reply to find a *single* person. Women seek IVF at an old age, that has a low chance of success. If they fail and its only an 11% chance of success then yes they regret not having children. Honestly I think 40 is far too late to have children since you will be around 60 when they leave home.
That kind of attitude is
Re: (Score:2)
If you go to an old people's home and ask the residents whether they have any regrets about having their children, what will most of them say? "Gosh, I wish I'd skipped the whole nightmare!"? Perhaps not.
That's called survivorship bias. If you want to see the other side of the coin, go to a Walmart in a low-income area and just watch frustrated parents dealing with their out-of-control offspring.
Being ill-equipped (financially or otherwise) to raise a child certainly can be a nightmare.
Re: (Score:2)
No its not, people in rest homes are just old there is no necessary correlation to that and them being in rest homes.
Also looking at frustrated people dealing with rowdy children it not the same as regretting having them. You may even regret it in the moment, the moment passes and you love them. If you take that opinion with say your partner you must not have very many long term relationships, the moment they annoy you that means a bit means you regret ever dating them?
I think we are talking about long term
So the problem is (Score:2)
This is before we talk about the fact that being a dink often correlates with more happiness.
Remember that as soon as you get a little bit below your income the majority of parents didn't plan it and didn't want it. 50% of pregnancies are unplanned.
But
Re: (Score:2)
You are lying to yourself. Here is why https://www.bps.org.uk/psychol... [bps.org.uk]
You and your wife would have had a much better life without children.
Re: (Score:2)
I could imagine somebody like Elon Musk absolutely loving the idea of creating custom-made human beings in a lab to use as he sees fit. I'm frankly
Re: Axolotl Tanks (Score:2)
Have you ever considered getting laid? It might help. Maybe narcc will sleep with you? I think he has a bad hygiene fetish so it should all work out. Though he'll probably make you agree to kick him in the face first.
Re: Axolotl Tanks (Score:2)
Wasn't always a thing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHi... [reddit.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Someday probably but with the global population still increasing (and projected to do so for some time) we definitely don't need them now.
Re: (Score:3)
Spoilers (Score:2)
It's ironic that you chose this Dune reference, since it was eventually discovered that the Axolotl tanks were
Re:Axolotl Tanks (Score:5, Informative)
In case of Japan, their best birth rates in recent history were at peak of Meiji era.
That's when men were highly driven to be as good as possible with extreme intrasexual competition among men, coupled with legal structure which granted best of the men effective ability to just chain marry through female population of Japan. Birth rates were through the roof, as did divorces. You could only marry one woman at a time, but if you could afford it, you could serially marry through many women, and generate a lot of children. Who were then taken care by the husband who got children in the divorce.
That's just over a century ago.
Re: (Score:2)
No, Japanese did not invade Poland. You sound like Russian sailors on Imperial Russian Navy ship Kamchatka in 1904, who kept seeing Japanese destroyers and torpedo boats in Baltic and North Sea.
Re: (Score:2)
Did that boom lead to expansionist foreign policy that caused World War II?
No, Japanese did not invade Poland.
US involvement in World War II stemmed from the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Re: (Score:2)
The US was involved in the war between Japan and China before Pearl Harbor. War with Japan was considered inevitable by 1938 when the US started serious expansion of the Navy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2)
The real problem is the military managed to take over the government of Japan. They managed that through political intrigue and through assassinations. These days, it's generally regarded in Japan that was a bad idea.
Re: (Score:2)
You really need to read some history books. Simply put, Japan invaded China, US objected, sent support to China including military.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Roosevelt put an oil embargo on Japan, Japan decides to take Indonesia to get their oil, but US Pacific fleet (which had just been moved to Pearl Harbor, another thing that alarmed the Japanese) had to eliminated first, so Pearl Harbor.
Scroll down to Historical Background in this for the backdrop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's cool and all. Also almost half a century into the future.
Seriously, what's up with so many people having no idea that there were wars other than WW2 in the world? Meiji's rule ended before world war ONE.
Re: (Score:2)
What people?
Re: (Score:2)
What people?
Historians.
Even if you dont count their initial invasion as part of WW2 they were militarily still quite involved over there once the Germans got going.
Re: (Score:2)
What historians argue that world war 2 started about two decades before world war 1 with Japanese invasion of China? Specifically?
Re: Axolotl Tanks (Score:2)
We are talking about the 1937 invasion of nationalist China not their invasion of independent Manchuria
Re: (Score:2)
And even the invasion of Manchuria was in 1931 not before WW1.
Re: (Score:2)
Me:
"Japanese invasions of China started way earlier than you think".
AC: ooo, I'm going to own you by saying that you didn't even know Japan invaded China.
You can't make this shit up.
Re: (Score:2)
No, it was related to peak Meiji Japan.
Meiji died before WW1 started. And he invaded China.
Re: (Score:2)
I doubt any other structure would stand a chance. Free love communes and traditional Kibbutz mostly failed, Harems would not be accepted.