Children's Day

In Japan, May 5th is designated "Children's Day". Alas, since 1981 (27 years) the popping of rice-wine corks has been distinctly muted.

"All Aboard!" the Tokyo Express to demographic oblivion. Every year since Reagan's inauguration, the number of Japanese aged 14-years or younger has progressively declined. As of April 2008, grade-schoolers numbered 17,250,000, down 130,000 (-.75%) from a year earlier. This is a record low, the fewest kiddies since statistics first tabulated pre-adolescents back in 1950.

Worse yet, Japan's Internal Affairs Ministry reports that the ratio of flaming youth to total population has now shrunk to 13.5% over 34 years from 1974-- another record low, which shows no signs of any rebound. At 1.3% (13 per 1,000), Japan's fertility rate falls well below the standard 2.1% (21 per 1,000) required to sustain a population. By 2050, the Ministry estimates that Japan's native workforce could shrink by a third, to some 42.3-million if demographic trends continue.

Japan is not alone in facing catastrophic population shifts. Continental Europe, Russia, Scandinavia, also exhibit extreme negative birth-rates. Africa, Asia, Latin America, are by no means immune... drawing on polygamous sinkholes, even Lands of Araby show frissons of concern.

What is it about the Modern Era of free-market peace-and-prosperity in developed countries since the 1950s that fosters (sic) abandonment of home and family, long thought humanity's most basic urge? Mayhap a new Darwinian selection-process gathers steam, whereby functional parents willing to forego material gratifications for the benefit of their posterity will "go forth and multiply", inherit the Earth by virtual default.

What Igor Shatarevich has called "The Socialist Phenomenon" (Harper, 1975), foreword by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, puts "something for nothing" generations in perspective. Living well betimes, at nightfall they leave not even Names. "That which ye sow, that shall ye also reap"... who cannot bring himself to sacrifice for others, our precious Little Ones, deserves oblivion. Protest they may, but those evading the most fundamental biological necessity partake a Culture of Death of which they themselves are the first victims.