During the 1960s a major topic was how China and India could implement effective population control, as their populations grew and resources and land space did not. Note 21st century Japan: the population is steadily shrinking. The National Interest’s John W. Traphagan wonders whether Japan is facing “death by demograhics.” Here’s a bit of his take:
[M]any media outlets in the US have paid relatively little attention to the other significant social, economic, and political issues that Japan is facing. Among the most complex and important of these is Japan’s low fertility and associated population decline. In 2013 Japan lost about 250,000 people, continuing a trend unlikely to abate any time in the near future. The 2013 population of Japan was about 126 million, while the Japanese government projects a drop to about 46 million if nothing intervenes to alter current trends (such as a dramatic change in immigration policy). The cause is fairly simple: Japanese have among the lowest total fertility rates (TFR) in the world at about 1.4 and this rate has been consistently under 2.0 (2.1 is needed to keep a population stable) since the mid-1970s. At the same time, the Japanese population is among the longest-lived in the word with about 25% of the people over 65 and only 13% in their teens. As the elderly have started to pass away, the population has started to shrink.
On the surface, this looks like a very troubling problem and some Japan watchers have argued it does not bode well for Japan’s future as an economic and political power in the world or in East Asia. Problems clearly do lie ahead. The most obvious is related to the cost of healthcare. In 2000, Japan initiated a long-term care insurance (LTCI) program designed to help manage and provide the care needed by an increasingly aged population. Like many social insurance problems, the young pay for the care of the old; when those younger people reach old age, there are insufficient younger people to pay without significant tax increases. As was predicted at the time, LTCI has proven to be quite costly, leading to long-term care expenditures (including out-of-pocket expenses) that have more than doubled from four trillion yen in fiscal year 2000 to 8.4 trillion yen in fiscal 2011. And projections have these expenditures increasing to 20 trillion yen by 2025, which will represent 3-4% of GDP. This has generated a public discussion about the future of LTCI leading to a report in August of 2013 by the government’s National Council on Social Security Reform on revising the program.
AND:
Obviously, an additional issue associated with the rapid growth in the aged population is social. Traditionally, adult children have provided care for elder parents with minimal involvement of public institutions…
….Beyond social and economic problems, population decline has generated a variety of other issues. According to anthropologist John Knight, rural depopulation is exacerbated by broad economic forces that drain labor from rural areas to cities as people seek education, work, and attractive urban lifestyles. There are some towns particularly in mountain areas that have no residents under the age of 50. This type of community became international news last summer when 15 elderly people in the mountain village of Mitake were murdered by a 79 year old resident. The victims represented 1/3 of the total population of a village consisting entirely of elders.
But many Japanese are not troubled by this trend, the Traphagan noted in a post on The Diplomat in August 2012:
In fact, most people in rural parts of Japan have first-hand experience with the effects of population decline and low fertility. Many rural towns have elderly populations well over 30% and one of the increasingly common scenes along rural roadways is the empty house once occupied by an elderly couple or single elder, and in the past by a three-generation family. It is a common refrain among residents of rural towns that walking around town you never see young faces; all of the people you meet are old. Indeed, one elementary school in Iwate Prefecture with which I am well acquainted has a total of about 50 students taking classes in a building designed for over 200 – this has been normal for at least the past decade. Rural Japan today provides a very good window into what will be a much less populated future for Japan in general.
While the declining number of births and increasingly elderly population may be problematic for the Japanese government in terms of the country’s economic future, many members of that declining population do not see this change in a negative light, even while they recognize the economic and social challenges Japan will face as their numbers decline. The fact that a host of pro-natalist programs—such as reimbursing parents for costs associated with childbirth, which has existed since the 1990s—clearly have not worked. This suggests that many members of the declining Japanese population are not particularly troubled by a future with fewer people, even if that brings changes in Japan’s position as an economic and political power and presents domestic challenges in addressing the needs of a growing number of elderly.
The Week offers this summary of Japan’s population problem:
The Japanese now have one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, and at the same time, one of the highest longevity rates. As a result, the population is dropping rapidly, and becoming increasingly weighted toward older people. After peaking seven years ago, at 128 million, Japan’s population has been falling — and is on a path to decline by about a million people a year. By 2060, the government estimates, there will be just 87 million people in Japan; nearly half of them will be over 65. Without a dramatic change in either the birthrate or its restrictive immigration policies, Japan simply won’t have enough workers to support its retirees, and will enter a demographic death spiral. Yet the babies aren’t coming.
It looks at various factors and notes this on marriage:
Why aren’t they getting married?
There are both cultural and economic barriers. In Japanese tradition, marriage was more about duty than romantic love. Arranged marriages were the norm well into the 1970s, and even into the 1990s most marriages were facilitated by “go-betweens,” often the grooms’ bosses. Left to their own devices, Japanese men aren’t sure how to find wives — and many are shying away from the hunt, because they simply can’t afford it. Wages have stagnated since the 1990s, while housing prices have shot up. A young Japanese man has good reason to believe that his standard of living would drop immensely if he had to house and support a wife and children — especially considering that his wife likely wouldn’t be working.
And:
Could this tradition change?
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants it to. This fall, he renamed his economic plan from Abenomics to Womenomics. “Creating an environment in which women find it comfortable to work,” he told the U.N. General Assembly, “is no longer a matter of choice for Japan. It is instead a matter of the greatest urgency.” He promised to expand day care offerings and promote flexible work arrangements so that women would no longer have to choose between work and childbearing, and he challenged businesses to promote women to senior management. Most economists, though, think that the trends won’t change fast enough to prevent a real demographic crisis. “Sooner or later,” said economics professor Heizo Takenaka, “Japan will have to face the necessity of immigration.”
If the trending continues, will Japan one day wind up like an aging East Coast American city with few young people, fewer people and fewer people to provide the taxes and services needed to thrive — and survive?
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.