One policy, whilst a drop in the ocean, albeit a pretty hefty drop considering the comparatively high percentage of Japanese kids with a non-Japanese parent, would be to allow those children to remain Japanese when they turn 21 and not force them to choose between cultural identities and futures.

Of course, the alternative faced by many countries where the population seems set to outstrip the nations' resources looks even bleaker and has scarier implications for all of us. Japan's "population problem" may be internationally envied much sooner than we'd imagine. The last couple of decades had economists and think tanks proffering Japan as a cautionary story, now there's a huge revision going on and what was once regarded as failure is now being looked into as a strategy worth emulating by the West's recession hit economies