Japan and China are indeed moving in opposite directions. But, pace the feminist-capitalist alliance, represented here by Harry Krejsa and Maryam Janani, the careful reader will take note that it is China, not Japan, which is currently moving in the right one.
Japan’s society is overworked, impotent and porn-addled, and is failing to reproduce at a self-replacing rate. The reason? A policy stance which is explicitly anti-natal, anti-child and anti-elderly have been shoved down their throats for decades by the Let ‘Em Die Party. Add to that the fact that Japan discourages women from having families, and again has done so for decades, and a clear picture begins to emerge. Modern Japan is what the ideology of defamilialisation inevitably looks like in an advanced stage.
China, on the other hand, is slowly - too slowly - but surely rediscovering its age-old Confucian roots, after decades of their active repression at the hands of Communist ideology. They are quietly undoing Deng's monstrous One Child Policy, and they are quietly encouraging traditional gender roles. China has already kind of screwed itself in the middle-run through its bureaucratic meddling in family planning, but in the long term one hopes that they are headed in the right direction.
And the IMF, though of course they are encouraging Abe’s neoliberal corporate reforms aimed at turning women into replacement men, are flipping out over China’s perceived volte-face. Is it genuinely to be believed, as Krejsa and Janani insinuate, that more women marrying, staying at home and having children in China is directly to blame for her current economic woes? Or, on the other hand, is it more likely that state-driven overinvestment in housing, when not enough people are being produced to make use of that housing, has been inflating a bubble…?
Just something to think about.
China’s growing interest in traditionalism is certainly something to watch, though.
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