Travelogue : A week in Tokyo - 2

I don’t know about you, but when I travel, one of my main goal is to learn more about the inhabitants of the place I am going to and their lifestyle. In my opinion, everything else is only secondary. Indeed, how can you apprehend and fully appreciate the food, architecture or cultural life if you do not grasp the mentality of the people living there ?!

That’s why in this second post, I chose to show a candid shot that I took. I think I shows two things: the first one is that Tokyo is a the economical, commercial and financial center of Japan. So services, assurances, and finance are widely predominant… And you can feel that everywhere you go and look. The numbers of employees per costumers, weather it is in museums, metro stations or even shopping centers, is way higher than what we are used to in Europe. I think that this scene shows this perfectly ; there are 3 childminders for 8 children. Such a ratio simply does not exist in our European school system, it seems like a luxury to us.

Which makes me want to talk to you about the birth-rate in Japan : it is the second lowest in the world, right after South Korea. Women in Japan now have 1.4 baby (even though the generation replacement threshold is 2.1% of children per woman). In 2017, the archipelago reached 944 000 births for 127 inhabitants.
This results in an aging of the population that is becoming critical and might force the country to open up to immigration. But this solution does not seem ideal for many Japanese as currently only 1% of the island population is foreign. Many see this as a lost of homogeneity and loss of the insular spirit of Japan.

Nikon D750 - Natural light - With post-processing

Follow these links if you want to read my old articles about this trip :
Opus 1 : https://busy.org/@ajanphoto/travelogue-a-week-in-tokyo-1