The "optimism" is based on the fact that, despite the doom and gloom predictions, Japan's GDP does not appear to actually suffer from an ageing population.
Why do people care so much about GDP, the number is higher now than for my parents generation but it is much harder for people now to buy a home/start a family. A recent thought I had is that less durable consumer goods actually increases our gdp by the same factor that it makes us poorer. If you have to replace a refrigerator every 5 years instead of 10 you are spending twice as much to have a fridge but GDP says you are twice as rich.
GDP is kinda like measuring a programmers productivity by LOC production. It is correlated with productivity when you are not judging based on it but once people start optimizing for it it no longer correlated.
> Why do people care so much about GDP, the number is higher now than for my parents generation but it is much harder for people now to buy a home/start a family.
That's true everywhere. Inflation has been low for the last 20 years. Consequently interest rates interest rates have been low, and so asset prices have been spiralling upwards for the last 20 years. Spiralling asset prices means the price of a house is a higher multiple of your yearly income. And yes, if you happen to be at the house buying age at this time in the cycle it's downright unpleasant. We all know interest rates will likely rise, and that will cause a great deal of pain to people who maxed out their borrowings when rates are at record lows. Japan is the spiritual home of low inflation and high asset prices so it's been going on much longer there. But this has been happening in most countries, and most of them have growing populations.
I live in Australia. I find Japan's hand wringing about the "our standard of living is doomed if out population density keeps dropping" downright funny. Japan has slightly worse GDP per capita than us (which I would put down to Australia's abundant natural resources). But when it comes to population density, there is simply no comparison:
Yeah. Why are people so obsessed with increase in GDP? Why does it have to grow all the time? I saw somewhere it's referred to as "rich people's yacht money" and that feels correct with everything going on.
The likelihood that you're using immigrant labor is 100%. Japan is hugely dependent on immigrants -- particularly those from SE asian countries (e.g. Vietnam), who provide the bulk of the low-wage, low-skill labor.
Visit any hotel in Japan, for example, and the cleaning staff will be almost exclusively non-Japanese. Even the "traditional" inns in the smallest towns usually have "trainee" labor from foreign countries.
Found this out because the immigrants are almost fluent in English as opposed to the Japanese who can read/write but not speak. It made for an embarrassing conversation when asking for directions. I implied she was local in my thanks. She was quick to note (although very friendly) that she was in fact not japanese and actually vietnamese.
