As Japan’s birth rate, which has been increasingly falling for the last several years, fell to a record low in 2014, theories involving economic stagnation combined with societal reasons have been put forward to explain the lack of population growth. In Japan the “traditional” family values still hold true and it is rare for a couple who aren’t married to live together, much less have a child out of wedlock. With marriage being the only socially acceptable way of having a child and young couples waiting much later in life to get married, the fertility rates remain low and perhaps this is one significant reason for the population level sinking. However, there is another theory to explain what is happening and it all began with a ‘rat city’ in the 1940s.

John Calhoun was an American ethologist who focused on the behaviour of rodents to explain the problems humanity may face in the future with an ever increasing population. In 1947, he started his first rat city with 5 pregnant females in a holding pen built on a 1000 square metres of land. With enough land to house approximately 5000 rats, Calhoun watched his rat city grow to 150 inhabitants, level off, and then never exceed 200. Even though the rodents had ample room to grow their population size to much higher levels, it hadn’t happened.

It wasn’t until 1954 that Calhoun would be able to repeat his experiment and create his rat utopia once more. Providing them with sufficient food, shelter and protection against predators and disease, Calhoun set out to study the rodents with one minor change; the room was divided up into smaller holding pens to see how different social groups would form. The rat population bred rapidly, consuming more and more space and slowly turning from a utopia into a doomed, collapsing society.

Some rats formed into dominant groups of males, attacking any rat they perceived as weaker, including the young or females. Mothers abandoned their babies, some rats became hypersexual, some ate the dead that were left among them, and in the late stages of the experiment, most of the mice left had withdrawn from the society spending most of the time grooming (a now pointless exercise) themselves and not participating to the overall breeding population. The rats were no longer rats.

I find this experiment both fascinating and quite scary considering it changed the fundamental behaviour of an animal simply by limiting space. Calhoun warned of similar problems that humans could face if we didn’t plan cities accordingly, accounting for density and population size, and I do wonder if we are witnessing the effects of this in Japan. Tokyo’s own population density of 2,642 per square km, the highest in the world, is just staggering and the lack of space has long been an issue. Could there be a connection? Hikikomori in Japanese means “one who withdraws from society”, and in Japan there are young adults who are recluses, living in their parents’ home with all their needs catered for. Is it possible Calhoun’s predictions are now coming to pass?

If we take into account not just the lack of space, but the competition for sex, the competition for jobs, for security, and for social status amongst peers, maybe we are on track for a similar collapse of society. By 2050 the population will grow to 9.6 billion people, and I think we will see the rise of the Hikikomori all over the world. Perhaps it would be a fitting end to the demise of society; we’d screw ourselves out of existence. I quite like that thought, and after all…“we weren’t born to be happy, we were born to reproduce”.

Want to read more by Fragarach?

https://stripped-magazine.com/category/columns/drinking-the-milk-of-paradise/