The voice of pessimism or the voice of reality?

Lately I've been working my way through Philip Longman's book The Empty Cradle, and today I stumbled across a Washington Post article on population trends in Japan:

Japan, now the world's second-largest economy, will lose 70 percent of its workforce by 2050 and economic growth will slow to zero, according to a report this year by the nonprofit Japan Center for Economic Research.

Population shrinkage began three years ago and is gathering pace. Within 50 years, the population, now 127 million, will fall by a third, the government projects. Within a century, two-thirds of the population will be gone.

In what is now being called a "super-aging" society, department and grocery stores have recorded declining sales for a decade -- and new car sales have fallen for 18 consecutive years.

I've been skeptical for some time regarding the future of investments that have done well for the last few generations, but set those concerns aside and tossed a bunch of money into mutual funds earlier this year, hoping that the market had bottomed out. I wonder if my earlier assessment was correct - statistics on Japan's continued sales declines seem to support such a conclusion.