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Intermediate Japanese - Free Online Course
SHŌSHI KŌREI-KA
少子高齢化
"few children, aging population"
Most of the world’s advanced economies will face challenges resulting from aging populations over the next few decades. Japan is no exception in this regard. The average Japanese woman can now expect to live to age eighty-five; and the average Japanese man will see his seventy-eighth birthday. The country’s population over the age of one hundred is now in the tens of thousands.
The problem, of course, is that fewer Japanese are being born. Japan, like the United States, experienced a long postwar baby boom. In 1946, Japan’s population was around 76 million. Over the next two decades, the population grew rapidly. By the end of the 1960s, there were more than 100 million people in Japan.
By the early 1980s, however, Japan had slipped into the demographic pattern now common to advanced nations: smaller families, more adult singles, and longer life spans. In 1981, Japan’s population was growing at a rate of 3.5%. At the end of the decade, the growth rate had fallen to 2%. A little more than ten years later, in 2003, the rate had fallen to 1.3%.
In 2005, Japan’s population was 127,417,244. Most demographers expect the population will peak at around 130 million, and then begin decreasing. Based on the assumption that current birthrates trends continue, some demographers have predicted that Japan will have less than 100 million people in 2100, and that the middle-aged and elderly will comprise a majority of the population. If this scenario comes to fruition, it will impose huge burdens on Japan’s pension and medical care systems, and potentially put the brakes on economic growth. A population in which young people are in the minority could also change the very nature of society, given that societies generally depend on the energy and drive of their younger members.
It is difficult to accurately predict the long-term implications of Japan’s low birthrates. Many changes could occur in the interim to offset the aging of the population. When we examine the writings of the past, we find that many dire predictions about population (the writings of Malthus and Paul Ehrlich come immediately to mind) never came to pass.
First of all, birthrates could increase again. An extended period of low birthrates is not unprecedented in Japan. For more than a century during the Edo Period (1603 – 1867), Japan’s population barely budged. Between 1720 and 1830, the population grew from 26.1 million to 27.2 million, an increase of a little more than 1 million people in a hundred years. Then, as now, Japanese married later and reared smaller families. In this way, the present lackluster birthrate could be a temporary reaction to transitory economic and social phenomena.
Furthermore, there is no reason to assume that ages perceived as “old” today will be quite so “old” in the future. Medical advances could extend the productive years of everyone, so that the population of the future—though older in years—is just as vibrant as the population today. This scenario is especially likely in Japan, given the country’s already advanced healthcare system.
A third possibility is an increase in immigration from outside Japan. In the United States and Canada, the birthrates of the native-born populations are far lower than they were in the immediate postwar years, but overall population growth rates are still high because of immigration. So far, the Japanese government has balked at the idea of opening the doors wide to outsiders. (There are about 1.2 million foreign residents in Japan.) But this is another situation that is subject to change in the future.
