As we all know, Japan is always on the cutting edge of everything. And with a perennially ailing economy and a declining birthrate, the Japanese have an awesome new tool to get their citizens procreating: a robot baby with vaguely human facial expressions! The video:

On the one hand, you’ve got to admire the Japanese devotion to all things virtual. The nation that gave us Tamagotchi is a place where you can have a virtual girlfriend, marry a pillow, and have sex with a lifelike simulacrum of an anime character. For anyone even a little bit anxious about love, sex, marriage, and fatherhood, it can be  enticing: Why deal with all that messy reality when technology can clean it all up?

What I see here, though, is not just Wacky Japan getting wacky again. No, I see a society that’s gotten to a point where the practicalities of the traditional process of having a family have gotten so complicated and difficult that no one’s having kids. Seriously: In 2001, the nation had 1.2 million births, and the government projected that by 2050 it would be half that—in a nation of 127 million people! This is not good news.

Now, I don’t particularly care if Japanese people fail to reproduce, although without Japanese people who will make my yummy, yummy ramen? But I see this as instructional for us here in New Yorkistan.

For example: I’m 35, rather old in traditional terms to have a 1-year-old. Why did I wait so long? Why do so few of my friends have kids older than 4? Is it because we weren’t emotionally ready for the responsibility? Or was it because it just seemed, on a very practical level, impossible to have kids and pursue anything resembling a career?

I don’t mean this all as a big kvetch—just as a way to think about American policies designed (or not) to make it easier (or harder) for families to survive. Parents taking off work early, maternity/paternity leave, health insurance, acceptance of children in public places—all those things that some people love to complain about are, I feel more and more, essential if we want this country to, you know, keep going.

The alternative, of course, is to permit much more immigration—which, of course, I’m also totally in favor of.