Japan is heading for trouble, the country’s prime minster Fumio Kishida has suggested. ‘Our country is on the brink of being unable to maintain the functions of society,’ he said in a speech earlier this week. Japan’s birth rate, the average number of children a woman will have, is too low, and still falling. It’s 1.3, and needs to be 2.1 to keep the population stable. With every year that passes, there are hundreds of thousands fewer Japanese people.

Economics is mostly to blame. Once, there was a secure and predictable life was for the average Japanese person. The men would toil away at a big company in return for the assurance of lifetime employment. Even if you became surplus to requirements, or were a complete duffer, you would be kept on, if only to stare out of the window.

Women, meanwhile, were expected to make babies, run the household, and wisely spend the money that their exhausted husbands would hand over to them. As recently as 2007, health minister Hakuo Yanagisawa referred to women as ‘baby making machines’. He kept his job.

But in the years since Japan has changed. Lifetime employment is no longer so certain, even though corporate culture remains brutal. Despite government efforts to improve childcare support for workers, there are reports that female employees who have got pregnant and requested maternity leave have been harassed. In Japan it’s called ‘mata hara’ – a shortened form of ‘maternity harassment’. Work life can be grim and unfair. It’s not a world to bring children into.

Many Japanese people also seem scared of the future. We live in an age of anxiety, but in Japan this is taken to the extreme. Council gardeners wear crash helmets to prune rose bushes, and there are relentless warnings from the government and the media about extreme weather, seismic disruption, the threat of North Korea and China, and the never ending Covid ‘crisis’. Face masks are still worn by nearly everyone, despite Kishida virtually pleading with people to stop.

There is no easy solution. The prime minister is trying to effectively bribe people to have children. Kishida said at the beginning of January that the government plans to increase child benefits for parents and double the total funding for childcare support. But back in 2017, at a cost of around £14 billion, Shinzo Abe’s administration promised free day care for children between three and five-years-old; since then, the birth rate has fallen further. Why would the latest announcement work any better to address Japan’s baby crisis? Kishida has also promised to double defence spending in the next five years; many are asking whether the government will ultimately have to decide if bombs or babies get the cash.

Increasing immigration – the cheap, short-term fix to Japan’s population problem – probably won’t work here either. If there are no Japanese kids to work, immigrants could keep the economy afloat. But many people think flooding the country with newcomers will hurt Japan’s unique culture. New arrivals, they assume, won’t bother learning kanji or keigo (polite Japanese) or acquiring the delicate skills of kimono and calligraphy. Two per cent of the population in Japan are foreign-born. In the UK, 17 per cent are.

Kishida’s comments might sound hyperbolic: Japan is hardly the only country in the world with a low birth rate, and society seems to be functioning just fine. The streets are clean, the trains run on time, the health service is efficient, the crime rate is low and there are no strikes. Britons have much to be jealous about. Japan, though, is only at the beginning of what could be a painful decline. It needs to find a fix. The demographic time bomb is ticking.