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More than 1 in 10 people in Japan are now aged 80 or older, and the country consistently rates as having the world's oldest population. This is having a profound impact on Japan's economy, workforce and society.
Japan’s nine major urban areas account for 53.9% of the total population, with Greater Tokyo now home to 28.4%. Rural areas, on the other hand, are being hit by severe declines. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has made tackling the problem of Japan’s shrinking population a priority.
Nowhere is this felt more acutely than in Japan, where the population declined by more than a quarter of a million last year. That’s the equivalent of three times the amount of people it takes to fill London’s Wembley Stadium in just 52 weeks, and it’s showing no signs of slowing.
Japan's population is ageing at a rate unparalleled in other countries. According to the 2022 White Paper on Ageing Society, published by the Cabinet Office, Japan's population aged 65 and over currently stands at just over 36.21 million, accounting for 28.9% of the total population. This number is expected to peak at 3,935 by 2042.
The challenge in rural Japan is big. In many parts of the countryside, the over-65s already account for more than one-third of the total population, a generation earlier than the nation as a whole. While the elderly in Japan are often healthy, total life expectancy is nonetheless rising faster than so-called “healthy life expectancy”. This ...
With the world’s second-largest ageing population, Japan is also contending with a low birth rate, leading the country’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to announce in January 2023 that “Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society”.
Japan’s shrinking working-age population is a demographic timebomb. Image: OECD Compared with the 65.3 million working-age people in 2017, the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry expects there to be just 60.82 million in 2025 and only 52.45 million in 2040.
Web3, the metaverse, automation and the NFT market are examples of digital solutions being used to address the problems that accompany Japan's declining population. Japan often acts as an early adopter and its application of technology to social dilemmas could become a proof of concept for the rest of the world.
Japan’s labour force peaked in the early 1990s at just under 70% of the population, according to the International Monetary Fund. The labour force is now below 60%, making it the lowest among G7 nations. Japan’s population shrank by 300,000 last year.
Japan is not the only country experiencing a reduction in birth rates. In 2021, Taiwan, China, was found to have the lowest fertility rate in the world , with an estimated 1.07 children per woman. At the beginning of the pandemic, jokes circulated that lockdowns would cause a baby boom, but global economic insecurity had the opposite effect on ...