The fall of civilisations is rarely marked by a single event. It is a slow, creeping rot, visible only in retrospect. This week offers two such signposts. First, the United Kingdom continues to confront its demographic crisis, a shrinking birth rate that threatens the welfare state and the very notion of a national future. Second, in Japan, the son of the Crown Princess has been jailed for rape, a scandal that shakes the Chrysanthemum Throne to its foundations. One crisis is a slow-burn economic affair. The other is a sudden, violent breach of trust. Yet both speak to a deeper decadence, a fraying of the social contract that once held the West and its Eastern cousins together.
Let us dispense with the euphemisms. Britain’s birth rate is not a problem of economics. It is a problem of meaning. Europeans no longer believe in the future. They have traded the messy, exhausting business of raising children for the sterile comforts of consumerism and career. The state’s frantic attempts to bribe people into reproduction, with tax breaks and subsidised childcare, are as effective as offering a drowning man a glass of water. The crisis is spiritual. A society that does not replace itself is a society that has given up. It is a quiet, polite suicide.
And then there is Japan. The land of the rising sun has long been the laboratory of this demographic decline. Its birth rate is the lowest in the developed world. Its population is shrinking. But this week’s news reveals a deeper cancer. The Emperor’s grandson, a young man who should represent the continuity of tradition and honour, has been convicted of rape. This is not a private failing. It is a public symptom. The institutions that once commanded respect, from the monarchy to the family, have been hollowed out. Authority without virtue is a corpse. And when the heir to the throne is a rapist, the nation is forced to confront the question: what exactly are we preserving?
Americans will look at these two stories with a mixture of pity and schadenfreude. But they should not. The United States faces its own demographic cliff, and its own crisis of trust in institutions. The rot is universal. It is the fruit of a civilisation that has forgotten why it exists. We have traded faith for comfort, duty for rights, and permanence for pleasure. The result is a world of shrinking families and expanding prisons.
The lessons are brutal but clear. A nation that does not have children is a nation that does not believe in tomorrow. A monarchy that breeds criminals is a monarchy that deserves the guillotine. The British and the Japanese are the canaries in the coal mine. Their decline is our future if we do not learn. But who is listening? The air is thick with the smell of decay. And the only thing worse than a falling empire is one that does not even realise it has fallen.
