According to blogger Ana Swanson of The Washington Post, and many other bloggers around the Internet in the past week, Japan's government has been engaged in rosy, optimistic denial over its falling fertility rate.
Swanson writes: "The data ... shows just how bad Japan has been at forecasting its fertility rate since 1965. Government projections have been almost comically wrong, as the government repeatedly interpreted the sharp decrease in the fertility rate as a temporary dip rather than a sustained trend."
There's only one problem: The data show the exact opposite! Yes, Japan's government mistakenly forecast that fertility would bounce back ... until 1997. Somewhere around the turn of the century, the government wised up, and realized that the fertility rate was not about to bounce back. But data shows that the forecasts have been too pessimistic for more than a decade now. Fertility rates bottomed out at 1.26 children per woman in 2005, and have been rising since — despite the sharp recession and natural disasters that happened in the meantime. The modest rise has been sustained, and the fertility rate has bounced back to 1.43 in 2013 — a 13.5 percent rise from its low.