Can Japan Reverse Its Birth Rate Collapse? Jim Penman Explains the Real Solution

All right, welcome to another episode of Conversations with Jim Penman as well, which is about the birth rate crisis problem and Jim's upcoming book. I'm going to talk about chapters and parts of the book as well for you to learn a little bit more about it before it's released. Now, next country we're going to talk about which people quite often will see online is Japan. So we spoke about South Korea last time. So now let's go into detail about Japan. So Japan's obviously for a country that is so obsessed with work, they've even gone in Tokyo, the government jobs, they've gone to the four day work week to try and address that, which is around 150,000 employees, hasn't done anything. And then you've obviously got cash as a child allowance which now runs to 18. There's a third child bonus which doubles. There's 100,000 yen maternity gift. There's public high school tuition becomes free again. National university tuition is waived for families with three or more kids, which is quite a big, big thing there. Then the work life reforms, which is the four day work week when both parents take leave pay will be reached 100% of take home wages. There's a whole 50% of fathers on leave by 2025. There's a whole bunch of things newlyweds can claim. Tokyo funds an AI dating app that vets income and intentions disperse serious marriages. IVS costs have been covered by the National Insurance since 2022. And there's a whole bunch of different things as well. But let's look at the trends. So the fertility rate I think is now reported as 1.20. And some have got it at one point which is well replaced replacement and the roadblocks to it, they're saying number of women aged 25 to 34 keep shrinking, limiting any rebound in births. There's a whole bunch of things as well. So thoughts about all that stuff? Japan is trying.

Well, they got one of the lowest birth rates in the world and they're trying whatever Buddhist is trying. They're saying, people say when you ask them, I don't have kids because of money. So they keep on giving more money and more assets. It's not the solution. The problem is not so much. People don't have any money in absolute sense because back when Japanese fertility was very high, which is in the post war period after like the 1950s, people had a fraction of the wealth they have today and they still had multiple children. As the, as it's become more prosperous, the birth rate has shrunk. It's not bad, even though people say it is. And that's hard for government think they say. You ask people what they oh, money, okay, we'll give you money. But it doesn't work. And that's because there's a fundamental change in character. You can't even meet it with propaganda. You can't bribe, you can't do anything. People are simply less interested in marriage. They're less interested in children than they used to be. They don't enjoy marriage as much as they used to. They don't enjoy children as much as they used to. That's the fundamental change. No amount of money would change somebody's priorities. If you like kids, you'll want kids regardless. I started having kids when I was very poor. Mowing contractor, working long hours, mowing lawns, doing gardening. I just wanted kids. It didn't matter. The only solution is you've got to change the character. And the only way to do that is through neuroscience. Japanese are a very wealthy country, they're starting to panic about this. There's a lot of brilliant people, there's a lot of brilliant scientists. All they've got to do is to take a fraction of 1% of these futile efforts they use in the tribe, prop up the birth rate and put it into basic scientific research, basic neuroscience research, work out treatments, help people to change their character in the way they want to change them because it'll make them happier, less anxious, more long term thinking, less interested in drugs and so forth, better, more interested in community. They'll be better and happier people. And once you do that, once you develop the treatments that have these effects, the birth rate will simply rise. The biggest problem you can have if you do this is that eventually population might start to grow so much that it puts pressure on the environment and that's a different issue. But if you change the neuroscience, if you change the character, we could solve this problem and solve it quite quickly.

Japan's very interesting because I've been in Japan and everything you can buy as a service. So people, rather than having a boyfriend can buy rent a boyfriend for the day or they can go and get a cuddle session for half an hour and all these sorts of things. It's quite a. And a lot of the young people at Emily have done some lot of documentaries on the fallen birth rate crisis and they interview these young people. They'd rather have a dog or they spend more time following their idol, idol around or whoever it is. There's no interest whatsoever in it as well, and as you said, you know, the Japan government even doing the AI dating app. I think the big one for me, when I saw it come out was the government doing the four day work week because we know how obsessed the Japanese are with work culture. And that was sort of alarm bells saying how the government's going to the four day work week just to try and.

Japanese have two attitudes that are very characteristic of the modern age. One is it's all about money. It's not, it's about values, it's about character. And the second is that it's, it's sort of to do with a culture. But governments have power. The governments can pass laws to make people. So in other words, if people don't want to get married, you have a dating app. The problem is it doesn't solve. The problem is that people don't want to get married. They don't enjoy being married much, they don't look forward to it, they don't want children. You're looking at things that the governments can do and people think governments are powerful. But in that vision, governments are incredibly feeble in this kind of area. They can't change attitudes.

And it's a massive concern because the, obviously the age, they live very long in Japan and Korea as well. They live extremely long and, and they're very, they're not a country which is very many migrants.

You know what happens when you've got a country with where, where half the, half the population is over 65? It'll happen too, because, well, that inverted.

The, Remember the pyramid we were looking at with your stuff? And it's going to go, rather than going like the top down, it's going to, you know, all the old people here and it's going to go like that.

See, what people are thinking in Japan is that the birth rate's gone down to this level, which is just about half the replacement. And the idea is to stabilize, is to bring, is to bring it up. But actually what they don't realize that if you look at the changes in attitude, it's actually going to continue declining. The Japanese birth rate, if you don't do anything proper about it, will be lower within another 10, 20 years. They'll be having as few children as they do in South Korea, which is about 0.7. It's about a third of what you need to replace it. And it's going to go lower and lower and lower. It will not turn around because the attitudes behind it are actually becoming even more pronounced in the younger generation. And you can See this with opinion polls, you ask people about children, about family, the youngest are the least interested, the most negative.

Yeah, it's quite interesting. And just that society in general, how I've been there and you see everything is just a commoditized service. People can just outsource boyfriend role for a day. And then they want to do this. And this is.

Yeah, yeah. And so it won't work. The governments are completely powerless. They can't do anything about it. Not unless they, unless, unless they want to invest like a fraction of a percent of what they're now doing in trying to prop up the birth rate and do something real. And the only answer is neuroscience can be solved. It's solvable. It won't even be expensive.

You could give away far cheaper than all this stuff.

I like 99% of that money, use it on something useful. Take that 1%, take that fraction of percent, put it in the neuroscience and you have the problem solved.

Just a question which is sort of related to this. Let's say someone from Japan listened to this and the government said, right, we want to try this with Jim. What does that extra money do for you? Is it just speed up so you can employ more people to do more tests or what does it actually do?

Yeah, it just looks. We've tested about a thousand drugs looking at this effects and we do it in brain cells. You put brain cells in little capsules and you put them in and then you look at the test, you look at the epigenetic changes and so forth. So it's math done by robots. Now in this last couple of months, We've tested about 1,000 different drugs. Okay. We found 61 pretty promising candidates. When you've got those, then you start looking at those, you assay them again, you check them and then you test them in animals. Now, you know, you're talking about, and then, and then you test them. Now, for example, it costs about 30 or $40,000 to do the basic animal test to see whether you get something real and whether it's not toxic. So we're not talking about a lot of money. You know, we can test 20 of them and you know, say 30, and that's like a million bucks, which is, which is a rounding out. That's the kind of thing you need to do. Yeah, and then you need to do things like getting scientists working in crispr, which is direct genetic manipulation, which actually, which is the real, the golden answer is to actually go into the genome and work out ways of changing that. It takes money, but you're talking about, you know, take records. Probably one or two hundred million dollars would do it. We're talking about a tiny, tiny fraction of what's being currently spent by government in futile attempt to proper birth rate. Japanese could do it.

I think they could do it. They've got the money, then they've got the willingness to do it as well. I think it's just them being knowing about this as a possible solution for them. I think they should try it. So that's what we're doing this sort of stuff in the hope that they can, when we translate it, and I hope we can get it to some people there. That's the job.

Well, our hope is through our research to actually to be able to develop some drugs that will show some effect. We only need to help people take 10% more likely to overcome drug addiction, for example, or just, you know, 5% less likely to commit suicide. Those kinds of results to be looking at. And once you know that you've got something there, then you've got big money from pharma. Big pharma coming in and saying, hey, what if we can get the people 20% less likely to be relapsed to drug addiction? And then you start tweaking it and these treatments will be worth trillions of dollars. So it's not as though there wouldn't be any money. Once we can start to develop some kind of a system to show people.

Well, that's what I was going to say. Let's say, for example, you do show some results in Japan. Could you replicate, like epigenes, for example? Could the epigenes, could they do something, what you're doing, like in Japan, based on what you're doing, or how would it work?

Genetically speaking, we're the same as the Japanese. There's no.

But I mean, in terms of the actual where the research takes place, do you reckon you could do it internationally or you'd have to.

Oh, yeah, yeah. In fact, some of these tests we probably will do overseas.

Right.

There's other countries that are just as well suited or even better. The Japanese could do that. We'll show them exactly what to do. We'll show them the drugs that we're using. Because we're not out to make a profit. We say, these are the drugs we're testing, these are the results. This is the epigenetic system we want. These are the pathways in the brain you want to look at. This is all our results. You take it and go for it. Set up a institute at the University of Tokyo and start working on it, you know, small amount of money.

Now, just out of interest, is that something you're like, with what you're doing with research wise, are you trying to actively seek out people in Japan and stuff to get this in front of them or how does that sort of work?

No, basically the idea is to reach enough people with the book that some people in power are going to be thinking, okay, we've tried everything else, it hasn't worked. Here's a fairly small amount of money by their terms that has potential to do this. Let's give it a try. Yeah, let's just, let's just fund some labs. Let's just do it. We can show them it's easy to set up. There are lots of brilliant scientists in Japan who have knowledge in this area. Let's just put them into this problem and see what you can do with it. And I really reckon I'm very confident that we can achieve it.

Thanks for your time today, Jim. And if anyone from the Japanese government or Japan's listening, please jimpeman. Com, send him a message as well. Birth rate crisis book will be out later in the year as well. Looking forward to this one because I think Japan would be in a prime position to do it and they've obviously got a willingness to spend as well, so hopefully someone can take notes from that. So thank you for your time today, Jim.