In the aftermath of World War II, Japan focused its effort on rebuilding the population, which it did.
But there was a clear downside to that economic growth. In the early 1950s, fertility rates hovered at a healthy 2.75 children per woman, UN data shows.
By 1960, as businesses asked more and more of their employees, the fertility rate had fallen to 2.08.
Despite the ongoing crisis, this is largely how Japan manages to remain the third-largest economy in the world.
On a daily basis, workers who stick to a strict professional hierarchy rise through a given company's ladder. It's reminiscent of US labor trends for most of the late-20th century.
Following feminism's slow build in Japan since the 1970s, today's workers strive for equality between the sexes, something Japan's pyramid-style corporate structure just isn't built for. That's because institutional knowledge is viewed as a big deal in Japan, Yale political scientist Frances Rosenbluth told Business Insider.
Veteran accountants can't expect to leave their current job and start a new one at the same pay grade, as managers are of the opinion that skills don't transfer. As a result, both male and female workers tend to stick around, even if conditions are miserable.
Surveys have found Japanese people still generally want to get married, but sex isn't all that important in the short term. Not that work is necessarily any more fulfilling.
"I do not see any joy in my job right now," Yoshiko Onuki, who works in marketing for Nissan, told Business Insider. Her husband Takehiro echoed the sentiment, saying the routine of his job at a steel supply company has become "boring."
They both say they want to look for new jobs, although neither could specify when that change might occur.
In 2010, the government launched the Ikumen Project, a campaign meant to teach single men the art of fatherhood and help them find wives.
The name ikumen comes from a term coined by advertisers to describe men who take an active role in raising their children.
Course instructor Takeshi Akiyama said he wants to help men offer a new perspective on adulthood and give them a leg up when searching for a partner.
"Matchmaking agencies can advertise such men as having 'extra value,' by letting potential partners know he will support the marriage," he told Reuters.
Today, the average Japanese person can expect to live more than 83 years. For women, the number is closer to 87.
"An aging population will mean higher costs for the government, a shortage of pension and social security-type funds, a shortage of people to care for the very aged, slow economic growth, and a shortage of young workers," Harvard sociologist Mary Brinton told Business Insider.
The trend is a combination of both greater numbers of seniors and those seniors using diapers for longer than babies typically need them.
In addition, many jails are turning into de facto nursing homes, as Japanese elders account for 20% of all crime in the country. With no one else to care for them, many reoffend just to come back.
Currently, dementia afflicts 5 million people in Japan, or 4% of the population. Estimates predict that number will rise to 7 million by 2025.
In Japan, families generally expect younger relatives to care for their elders. But constraints of time and money have prevented many people in younger generations from upholding that role.
With fewer young people to care for them, these lonely seniors wait out their remaining years, sometimes a decade or more, in isolation, according to a New York Times report.
Some people have worked out pacts with their neighbors to watch out for signs they may have died, such as not closing the blinds or turning off the lights, the New York Times reported.
"If it's closed," 91-year-old Chieko Ito told her neighbor, referring to a paper screen on her window, "it means I've died."
Japan now has two hotels run almost entirely by robots. They're located in the cities of Nagasaki and Tokyo.
There are robots to help people check in to the hotel, robots to carry their luggage to the appropriate room, and robots to haul people's trash away.
In 2015, SoftBank began selling 1,000 Pepper robots for consumer use, at a base price of $1,600 per robot. The supply sold out in one minute.
Pepper comes equipped with emotion-recognition software that analyzes voice tones and facial expressions. It's all part of Japan's effort to replicate the things that humans can do, if only there were more people to do them.
What was once seen as a biological problem has now been turned into an engineering one. Robots are being taught how to do human tasks without any of the drawbacks that come with fatiguable or impatient caregivers.
The country has no plans to increase its share of immigrant labor. According to Brinton, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe firmly believes that Japan's labor-force problem can be fixed without addressing the underlying shifts in culture and demographics.
It's a big bet, and one millions of people will be dealing with for the unforeseeable future.
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