Such performative garbage. If your society is structured such that you cannot have a child without the whole family being completely miserable, a dating app will not help you. But the government already knows that, they just don't want to change. You reap what you sow.
Most of highly wealthy and developed parts of the west (North America, Europe, Australia, etc) don't have Japanese society's strict conformism issues (quite the opposite actually) and yet birth rates of the locals are still shit, depending on immigration to stay positive.
What if, birth rates are a much more complex topic that can't be reducted just to one cause or the other but a cumulation of multiple factors.
Personally from where I'm standing (EU urbanite), I see the falling birthrates seem to be mostly caused by unaffordable housing in the big cities where most young people live, which seems to plague most of the developed west, as that's where all the jobs the young generations are taking, but there's no affordable space to raise a family in.
Sure, you can move out of big cities to the countryside with affordable land, but you'll either have to give up your white collar job and social circles you worked so hard for, or spend hours per day commuting (no, fully remote work isn't an option for most employees unfortunately). So middle class couples are struck between a rock and hard place where they're constantly waiting for the winds to turn in their favor till their biological clocks run out.
To me it seems that mass urbanization, as in the move from rural to urban, is a huge factor in killing birthrates across the world, not just the west, but also in places like China who in their rural poverty days had too many people that they had to cap the max number of children by law and now when a lot of it is urbanized and developed, they have the exact opposite problem.
Housing being unaffordable is a big one, but in my opinion the bigger aspect (which housing factors into) is long-term financial security (as in, there being little to no risk of financial crisis in the ~20 year timespan of raising a family) sitting just beyond reach. This incentivizes putting off having children as long as possible in attempt to achieve aforementioned security, but many never reach that point and end up never starting a family.
This isn’t a factor for the very poor or very wealthy, because financial security was never a possibility for the former to begin with and the latter already have it. Everybody in between gets tied up trying to become the latter because it seems possible, even if it’s not probable.
That's because we also have the same thing: "If your society is structured such that you cannot have a child without the whole family being completely miserable"
Japan is basically where we'll be in 30 years if we are extremely lucky
Where? This is not my experience in the EU. The "whole family" here seems quite hands off and liberal with what their adult kids are doing with their genitals, as in whether they decide to have kids or not and with who they're having them.
"USA" on its own seems like a poor answer. USA is very diverse. There's anything from strict religios communities who have a tonne of babies, to modern families which exclude having kids altogether as a lifestyle choice.
