biracial kids, finger phones, ebiz news from Japan
Sunday 19th, October 2003 Terrie's Take 251
...There is already a quiet revolution going on in Japan's population makeup. For example, did you know that 5% of registered marriages, or about 40,000 couples in 2002, were international marriages? Or further, that the average birthrate for international marriages is 2.9? That's twice the number of kids that a regular Japanese-only couple can expect -- so it's reasonable to expect that of the 1.1m kids born in Japan in 2002, about 10% of them were mixed- race kids. These statistics courtesy of the Glocom site. In fact, we did the math, and with an average birthrate of 2.5, Japan's roughly 400,000 international marriages in the last 15 years (starting at 13,000 marriages in 1980 and rising to 40,000 last year) has probably resulted in about 1,000,000+ mixed-race kids -- or "doubles" as some people like to refer to them. This is about 6% of all children born in Japan over the same period...