HOW JAPANESE SUPERSTITION CRASHED THE BIRTH RATE

Mizuko Kuyo: The Japanese Ritual of Mourning The Unborn

Make no mistake about it, under present conditions Japan is a doomed country. Right now it's fertility rate (the number of children per woman per life) is 1.20.

To understand what that means, think of a village of 200 people shrinking to 120 people within a single generation, and then keep repeating the process generation-on-generation. The second generation would be just 72!

Of course, Japan is not alone. The rest of the developed world is close behind or even ahead in the race to demographic destruction.

The essential problem in the developed World is that having a baby has become a big deal. Before a kid is born, a woman has to ensure that everything is perfect. This comes after she has made her decision to marry, where she has also been extremely fussy, probably only making her final decision to marry under pressure of the clock. Yes, the fussiness of women is killing us here in the developed world!

But the Japanese are even fussier than you might expect.

Look at the fertility graph below. 

Notice how Japan's birth rate -- the red line -- drops rapidly at the end of the 1950s, to around 2 kids per woman, and then stays generally above it until the mid 1970s, after which it gradually sinks into extremely negative territory. 

However there is one extreme oddity, a sudden drop from 2.14 in 1965 to 1.58 the next year.

What happened in that year? Was there a war, revolution, nuclear accident, or some other terrible natural disaster that forced women to delay having a child. No, none of that. Instead it was an outbreak of insane superstition!

Traditional Japanese astrology, which is simply based on traditional Chinese astrology, is replete with superstitions about lucky or unlucky days, years, or months. 1966 was the year of 丙午 (Hinoe-Uma), or the "Fire Horse." 

According to this superstition, baby girls born in that year were expected to grow up into headstrong women and thus make terrible wives, bringing shame on their families several decades later. In order to avoid that, many Japanese couples simply decided to skip having a baby. Yes, really!

In 1965 there were 1,823,697 live births. In 1966 that fell to 1,356,400 live births, a decrease of almost half a million, or half a million people who simply weren't born because of a childish superstition. If that doesn't amaze you, I don't know what will.