关于日本人口危机你必须知道的几件事(双语).doc

关于日本人口危机你必须知道的几件事(双语)2014年01月17日15:42 中国日报网 我有话说 关于日本人口危机你必须知道的几件事Why is Japan in trouble?The Japanese now have one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, and at the same time, one of the highest longevity rates. As a result, the population is dropping rapidly, and becoming increasingly weighted toward older people. After peaking seven years ago, at 128 million, Japans population has been falling and is on a path to decline by about a million people a year. By 2060, the government estimates, there will be just 87 million people in Japan; nearly half of them will be over 65. Without a dramatic change in either the birthrate or its restrictive immigration policies, Japan simply wont have enough workers to support its retirees, and will enter a demographic death spiral. Yet the babies arent coming。Why not?The British newspaper The Observer recently caused an international stir by reporting that Japanese youth have lost interest in sex. The sensationalist conclusion was mostly based on a single statistic: a survey that found that 45 percent of women and 25 percent of men ages 16 to 24 said they were not looking to have sex. The article also cited the phrase sekkusu shinai shokogun, or celibacy syndrome, as if it were a major trend. In reality, more Japanese singles are having sex than in past decades. In 1990, 65 percent of unmarried women and 45 percent of unmarried men had never had sex; today, the figures are 50 percent and 40 percent, respectively. Of course Japanese have sex, Asian studies professor Jeff Kingston toldB. If the number of love hotels is any barometer, it seems like many are getting plenty of it.Is celibacy syndrome a myth?Not entirely. There clearly is a subset of Japanese youth who have withdrawn from dating. Instead, they focus on online porn and games like Nintendos Love Plus, in which players conduct a relationship with an anime girlfriend. Hundreds of thousands of young men areknown as hikikomori, shut-ins who eschew human contact and spend their days playing video games and reading comics in their parents homes. (See below。) But most Japanese young people do have friends and relationships theyre just not settling down. The marriage rate has plummeted, and with it the birthrate, since out-of-wedlock births are rare in Japan. In 1975, just 21 percent of women and 49 percent of men under 30 had never been married; by 2005, the figures were 60 percent of women and 72 percent of men。Why arent they getting married?There are both cultural and economic barriers. In Japanese tradition, marriage was more about duty than romantic love. Arranged marriages were the norm well into the 1970s, and even into the 1990s most marriages were facilitated by go-betweens, often the grooms bosses. Left to their own devices, Japanese men arent sure how to find wives and many are shying away from the hunt, because they simply cant afford it. Wages have stagnated since the 1990s, while housing prices have shot up. A young Japanese man has good reason to believe that his standard of living would drop immensely if he had to house and support a wife and children especially considering that his wife likely wouldnt be working。Why make that assumption?In Japan, marriage usually ends a womans working career, even though most women are well educated. Once they have a child, women face strong social pressure to quit their jobs and assume very traditional roles, serving both the husband and the child. Mothers who want to keep working are stigmatized and usually find that employers wont hire them. Child care is scarce and expensive, while Japans brutal work culture often demands that employees work more than 50 hours a week. Japanese husbands arent much help either they spend an average of one hour a day helping with the children and household chores, compared with three hours for husbands in the US and Western Europe. You end up being a housewife with no independent income, bank worker Eri Tomita told The Observer. Its not an option for women like me.Could this tradition change?Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants it to. This fall, he renamed his economic plan from Abenomics to Womenomics. Creating an environment in which women find it comfortable to work, he told the U.N. General Assembly, is no longer a matter of choice for Japan. It is instead a matter of the greatest urgency. He promised to expand day care offerings and promote flexible work arrangements so that women would no longer have to choose between work and childbearing, and he challenged businesses to promote women to senior management. Most economists, though, think that the trends wont change fast enough to prevent a real demographic crisis. Sooner or later, said economics professor Heizo Takenaka, Japan will have to face the necessity of immigration.An epidemic of shut-insFor years, Takeshi hid from the world, playing video games all night and sleeping all day, eating from a tray his mother left outside his room. He was a hikikomori, one of an estimated 1 million Japanese teens and young men who have become shut-ins, with virtually no human contact beyond their parents. Some of the hikikomori first withdraw because of some social embarrassment bad grades, or a romantic rejection. The longer they drop out, the more shame they feel in a society where ones status and reputation are paramount and hard to change. Parents, and especially mothers, often enable the withdrawal. In Japan, mothers and sons often have a symbiotic, codependent relationship, says psychiatrist Tamaki Saito, who first identified the disorder in the 1990s. Takeshi re-entered society after four years, thanks to a government program that sends female outreach counselors known as rental sisters to coax the hikikomoriout of the house. But that program doesnt always work. As one shut-in of 15 years said, I missed my chance。为什么日本陷入了人口危机？日本现在是世界上出生率最低的国家，与此同时，也是世界上最长寿的国家，因此 日本的人口急剧下降，老龄化趋势也越来越严重。七年前，日本人口达到峰值1.28亿，这之后人口数开始走下坡路，每年减少近100万。政府预测，至 2060年，日本将仅有8700万人口，其中近一半是超过65岁的老人。如果日本的出生率和限制性的移民微博政策没有大的变动，那么这个国家的劳动力将无法抚 养其已经退休的父母，日本的人口死亡曲线将呈现螺旋上升的趋势，而出生率仍保持较低水平。为什么出生率这么低？英国报纸观察家近日报道称日本青年对两性欢愉之事失去了兴趣，这一言论引发了一场国际口水战。感觉论者得出的结论多数基于单一的调查数据：一项 调查发 现，年龄处于16至24岁的年轻人中，45%的女性和25%的男性称自己不再对性爱感兴趣。这篇文章同时提到“sekkusu shinai shokogun”这个短语，意思是“独身主义综合症”，这种现象似乎是现在的主要趋势。实际上，对比过去几十年来说，更多日本单身青年已经开始享受性爱 了。1990年，未婚人群中，65%的女性和45%的男性没有性经验，而现在，这两个数据分别降到50%和40%。一位亚洲研究教授杰夫金士顿 (Jeff Kingston)对彭博新闻社称：“日本人是当然是有性生活的，如果情侣酒店的数量在某种意义上是一种晴雨表的话，那日本人的性生活还是比较丰富的。”独身主义综合症是神话吗？不完全是。现今确有一类日本青年不去约会。取而代之的是，他们专注于网络色情和游戏诸如：任天堂的爱相随(Love Plus)，玩家可以与动漫女友展开一段恋情。成千上万的年轻人成为隐蔽青年，长期遁世并在父母的家里玩游戏看动漫。(见下文)但是大多数日本年轻人有朋 友和恋爱关系他们只是未安家。结婚率暴跌，随之而来的出生率，以及非婚生育率在日本也很少。1975年，30岁以下的人群中，只有21%的女性和 49%的男性从未结婚。截至2005年，这两个数据分别涨至60%和72%。日本人为什么不结婚？文化障碍和经济障碍同时存在。在日本传统中，婚姻不仅是浪漫的爱情，更是一种责任。20世纪70年代，包办婚姻是常态，甚至到了90年代大多数婚姻 亦是通过中间人介绍通常是新郎的老板。日本男人任由自己自行其是，不知道怎样找到妻子并且很多人羞于猎艳，因为他们简直支付不起。20世纪90年 代薪酬就已经停滞，然而房价却在狂涨。日本年轻男性有充分的理由相信，如果他必须还房贷以及供养妻子和儿女，那么他的生活水准会极大地下降尤其是在妻 子待业这种情况下。为什么会做出那种假设？在日本，婚姻通常意味着女性事业的结束，即使大多数女性受过良好的教育。一旦她们有了孩子，女人们因面临强大的社会压力而不得不辞职