Japanese workers turn to resignation agencies

It's insane how successful Japan is in spite of their corporate inefficiencies.

Maybe it's not in spite of but rather because of them?

To me, it seems like if you were designing a brand new society optimized only to maximize the countries GDP, you'd implement the Japanese model - employees who never leave their employers, extremely long work hours and mandatory after work social activities.

China, Japan and SK have all effectively implemented a version of this and their economic growth post WWII has been nothing short of remarkable (China was poorer than Sub Saharan Africa in the 50's).

Obviously, you could say this has not been going very well for Japan more recently but I'd argue the main drawback to this paradigm is the inevitable population implosion.

As with other places, it worked extremely well as long as the society was inherently sexist, and women weren't allowed to have "men's jobs" and were basically forced by society at large to be mothers and homemakers for husbands who were almost never at home and who never spent any time with their kids. With nothing better to do with their lives and time, and reliable birth control not yet invented or easily available, people had lots of kids to keep the system going.

Nowadays, women want to have more meaning in their lives than just being married to some guy they barely know or care about and raising his kids as some kind of servant with 2nd-class citizen rights. This isn't just in Japan, it's in every developed nation. The result of this is a far lower birthrate, so you can't have a super-high GDP for too long; you get a boost at the beginning because nearly 100% of adults can now contribute to GDP, but it burns out in a few decades because there's no one to replace them.

Societies need to come up with a new model.

The result of this is lower birthrate in the current cultural configuration.

As is, women regularly delayed having children until they're near or past their fertility window, if they want children at all. In our current society, it's difficult to both have a career and be a mother.

Very, very true. Professional women these days are going to extreme lengths now to have children at older ages: IVF, etc. As it is, it starts getting difficult at around age 35. Yet, advanced education can easily last until your late 20s, and your late 20s and 30s are the time when you need to build your career.

If scientists could come up with a way of making women much more fertile up to, say, age 60 (in an affordable and reliable way I mean, current treatments are unreliable and horrifically expensive), I wonder what effect this would have on the birth rate.

Or we could work with the natural order of things, rather than against it... nah, too crazy.

I'm not sure I'm joking when I say: if you manage to convincingly solve the "work/children" dilemma you may become a strong candidate for a Nobel prize (or at least The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences).