Poll shows population of Japan in decline
Print Edition
JAPAN’S latest census confirmed the hard reality long ago signaled by shuttered shops and abandoned villages across the country: the population is shrinking.
Japan’s population stood at 127.1 million last autumn, down from 128.1 million in 2010, according to the 2015 census, released yesterday.
The decline was the first since the five-yearly count started in 1920.
Unable to count on a growing market and labor force to power economic expansion, the government has drawn up urgent measures to counter the falling birth rate.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has made preventing a dip below 100 million a top priority, but experts have said it will be virtually impossible to prevent that even if the birth rate rose to Abe’s target of 1.8 children per woman from the current 1.4.
Without a substantial increase in the birth rate or loosening of staunch Japanese resistance to immigration, the population is forecast to fall to about 108 million by 2050 and to 87 million by 2060.
Tokyo’s rush hour trains are just as crowded as ever: Japan’s biggest cities have continued to grow as younger workers leave small towns in search of work. The census showed Tokyo’s population grew 2.7 percent from 2010 to 13.5 million.
However, a visit to any regional city will find entire blocks of shops shuttered, the owners usually either retired or deceased. In rural areas, villages are mostly empty and fields are overgrown.
The rate of population growth peaked in 1950 and has fallen continuously since 1975. By 2011, it had hit zero, the census figures show.
Although Japan is leading this demographic shift, the rest of Asia is following. In South Korea, China and elsewhere in Asia, improved life spans and falling birth rates are raising worries over how to provide for the rapidly expanding ranks of seniors with shrinking labor forces.
A World Bank report issued late last year forecast that health and pension spending will rise sharply at a time when elderly people can count on less support from their families.
“The rapid pace and sheer scale of aging in East Asia raises policy challenges, economic and fiscal pressures and social risks,” the report said.
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