Elon Musk’s tweet on Japan's declining population has triggered a storm. Netizens targeted the Japanese government which they say has done little to address the issue.

In a weekend post, the Tesla CEO warned that the Asian country would “eventually cease to exist” without a higher birth rate.

“At the risk of stating the obvious, unless something changes to cause the birth rate to exceed the death rate, Japan will eventually cease to exist. This would be a great loss for the world,” Musk wrote responding to government data that showed Japan had registered the largest drop in population in 2021 by a record 644,000.

It is the 11th consecutive year of decline in population in the country.

At risk of stating the obvious, unless something changes to cause the birth rate to exceed the death rate, Japan will eventually cease to exist. This would be a great loss for the world.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 7, 2022

Musk’s comment caused a stir among social media users with some blaming the successive governments for making half-hearted attempts to raise the birth rate in the country. Others said the world’s third-biggest economy was not the only developed economy experiencing long-term population decline, The Guardian reported.

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Japan’s population had peaked in 2008 and fallen to about 125 million last year. The government has warned of an adverse effect of falling population on economic growth and also conducted sporadic campaigns to encourage couples to have bigger families.

Reacting to Musk’s tweet, Tobias Harris, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, wrote: “The anxieties surrounding Japan’s demographic future is not that ‘Japan will eventually cease to exist’ but rather the profound social dislocations that are occurring as a result of the decline to a lower population level.”

Another user Cernovich tweeted: “Japan’s population has been the source of endless doomsday predictions, for decades, and yet the country is incredibly functional and advanced.”

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Some others hoped that the Japanese government would relax immigration norms. Japan had earlier firmed up plans to admit up to half a million blue-collar workers by 2025 to check the labour shortage problem in the country. However, the COVID-19 pandemic affected the plans.

Even before the pandemic, the country was at the forefront of the global “sex recession”, CBC News reported. According to a 2019 national survey, one out of every 10 Japanese men in their 30s was still a virgin, which made Japan's virginity rate higher than other industrialised nations. One of the primary reasons for the sex recession was financial insecurity, Peter Ueda, a public health researcher at Tokyo University, told CBS News.

If the authorities failed to check the trend, Japan's population would collapse by over half in the next century, Lucy Craft of CBS News had reported back then.

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(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)

First Published:May 10, 2022 10:56 AM IST