Because it's BS. It's glaringly fake and calls into question the rest of the claims of the post.

Housing prices aren't even insane, especially outside of Tokyo. And the property prices don't even go up. AND you can get 35 year housing loans at under 1% interest. The main reason housing prices have gone up at all is that construction materials cost have gone up due to inflation, Ukraine war, covid supply and demand issues.

Except only one of those systems depends on the exploitation of the working class, ya know, your breeding live stock. Only one of those system destroys a work life balance. Only one leaves the population with little free time and shrinking resources with which to have and raise a kid. Japan is past, and the US is passing, the tipping point. Society may deem it necessary but the potential parents recognize it as untenable.
What happens when the orphan crushing machine has no orphans?

In the context of Capitalism, sure, Japan is in trouble.

But then again, any system that demands infinite growth within a finite system has a biological parallel… in cancer. Yes, capitalism is economic cancer.

Japan has a bright future in front of it, if it can successfully pioneer an effective degrowth system that prioritizes the lives of people over Paraiste-Class profits.

and also need anti-cartel laws

Bring it on. Maximum 5 “homes” allowed per person, 7 for any family unit, children under 25 ineligible for ownership except as a post-death inheritance.

Anything above those limits is landlording-as-a-business, and combined with laws that make ANY business ownership of residential properly illegal, would force landlords to actually work for a living by getting day jobs.

Plus, have an extended “speculation tax” that hits any place being sold with a 100% tax on the first 2 years of owner-occupancy, with a straight-line decline to 0% in the eighth year. Any home being sold where the owner has never lived in it for a minimum of 2 years? 100% tax on the sale of the house straight out of the gate, with all proceeds going to a fund for first-time home owners. Exemptions, of course, for military deployment or death or a few other issues that cannot be leveraged for fraud.

People should be able to build what they want, where they want

I’ll be sure to build a toxic waste dump right beside your house.

Outside of capitalism it is hard to function below replacement level because the young people have to take care of the elderly

Sure, if you can pass the environmental requirements. And of course if any of the toxic waste leaks onto my property I’m gonna sue you for everything you’ve got.

It’s not city hall zoning laws stopping you from building toxic waste dumps. When I said people should be able to build what they want, I was talking about mixed density housing and mixed use / light commercial.

There are some good people here on Lemmy but my god are there an awful lot of obtuse, blockheaded teenagers! Get a clue!

I'm interested in the gay bales, where do I find out more about those?

Young people would have time to take care of the elderly if they weren't forced to work 60+ hour weeks consistently

Now, why bother having kids? You can’t do anything with them.

You mean you can't do anything profitable with them. Maybe people should be able to have a family for other reasons than profit

Kind of adjacent when the person is tying infinite economic growth with population “degrowth”

I'd be more interested in altering the material conditions that lead to low birth rates than relying on churning through the global population. We're already doing immigration like you said and have been. It still sucks to live in these conditions.

Olympic level goalpost mover right here.

In Japan they let kids go outside without supervision starting a really young age.

Yeah I live in Japan and my daughter started going on errands ("go get some milk/eggs") alone at age 5

They've been trying in Sweden by pushing paternal leave to make it so the males are just as likely to take time off as women so it's more equitable, but there was a lot of pushback on "forcing men" to do it and not allowing for "individual choice" as to who takes the parental leave

It really is. In the US I mean. I work 6 days a week 9 am till whenever the fuck I'm done. Sometimes at 1pm and some nights I'm not home by 7pm.

Luckily I've negotiated less work orders on Saturday later in the morning so I have some kind of decline of work towards the end of the week. It took six years of constant work to get even that. Otherwise it's 7 work orders a day and I drive around 150 miles a day. (I work in household appliance repair. So I travel from home to home.)

It's a thankless job I get micromanaged in. The only advantage I have is that appliance repair techs are always in high demand because there's so few of us and I'm good at my job so my boss can't really fire me.

As an American (or at least a non Japanese native) if my boss came up to me yelling and swearing in my face I would punch him out cold.

Actually if more Japanese did this I think things would improve at the office.

yeah but then they’d end up killing all of the middle management….
yeah, it’s a good solution

everyone keeps repeating that cancer metaphor, but a plague is much more appropriate….

You can thank their housing market