Population Decline and Ageing in Japan - The Social Consequences

Florian Coulmas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415401258
• eBook ISBN: 9781134145003
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Demography
• Index: Social Sciences

This book presents a comprehensive analysis of one of the most pressing challenges facing Japan today: population decline and ageing.

It argues that social ageing is a phenomenon that follows in the wake of industrialization, urbanization and social modernization, bringing about changes in values, institutions, social structures, economic activity, technology and culture, and posing many challenges for the countries affected. Focusing on the experience of Japan, the author explores:

• how Japan has recognized the emerging problems relatively early because during the past half century population ageing has been more rapid in Japan than in any other country
• how all of Japanese society is affected by social ageing, not just certain substructures and institutions, and explains its complex causes, describes the resulting challenges and analyses the solutions under consideration to deal with it
• the nature of Japan's population dynamics since 1920, and argues that Japan is rapidly moving in the direction of a 'hyperaged society' in which those sixty-five or older account for twenty-five per cent of the total population
• the implications for family structures and other social networks, gender roles and employment patterns, health care and welfare provision, pension systems, immigration policy, consumer and voting behaviour and the cultural reactions and ramifications of social ageing.

1 Facts and discourses

Ageing shock for Japan!? Asset meltdown and regular deficit by 2020 (Yomiuri Shimbun, 24 September 2004).

Ageing Asia. It’s not just Japan (Asahi Shimbun, 18 January 2005).

Start of population decline just ahead (Asahi Shimbun, 23 February 2005).

The birth rate decline lie (Newsweek Japan, 16 February 2005).

Natural population decline in 24 prefectures. Population 90 years and over exceeds one million (Asahi Shimbun, 15 March 2005).

At 1.29, birth rate again at record low, as in 2004 (Asahi Shimbun, 1 June 2005).

Birth rate yet again falls to record (Kyodo News, 2 June 2005).

What the future holds: The era of depopulation, part 5. Changing lifestyles, continuing falling birth rates (Mainichi Shimbun, 22 August 2005).

Editorial: Thinking about decreasing birth rates (Mainichi Shimbun, 18April 2005).

Why donations swell. Having fewer heirs, people don’t want to leave everything to their children (Nihon Keizai Shimbun, 14 August 2005).

Awareness of fertility decline, a generation gap (Nihon Keizai Shimbun, 18 July 2005).

Ministry of Land Infrastructure and Transport predicts: 90 per cent of population in urban areas; regional gaps widen (Nihon Keizai Shimbun, 14 August 2005).

Medical expenses 70 Trillion Yen. The 2025 nightmare (Nikkei Shimbun, 5 September 2005).

Japan’s economy is turning around. The great misunderstanding that the economy will shrink because of social ageing (Shñkan Daiyamondo, 10 September 2005).

1 in 5 65 or older. Highest level among developed countries (Asahi Shimbun, 19 September 2005).

All-time low birth rate 1.25 as fertility decline unabated (Asahi Shimbun, 1 June 2006).

Japan’s population now world’s grayest. Seniors top 20 per cent for first time: report (The Japan Times, 1 July 2006).

At the present time, halfway through the first decade of the twenty-first century, it is hard to find a topic that attracts more attention in Japan than current demographic changes; increasing longevity on the one hand, and declining birth rates on the other. Hardly a day goes by without media coverage concerning these topics. The above list is a random selection of headlines from major newspapers and periodicals, all of them on the front page. Content in magazines, books, TV shows, radio programmes, Internet forums, discussion groups at city halls and ‘letters to the editor’ columns are also just as intensely devoted to this general theme. It has forced the government to draft new legislation in various fields and occupies a permanent position on the agenda of local, regional and national politicians.¹ As demographic change has not visited Japan out of the blue and as it will continue for the foreseeable future, the media frenzy may seem surprising because it isn’t really news. But then the consequences of population ageing are so ubiquitous that virtually no social domain, no institution and no individual remains unaffected. And hence society reacts. Should the low statistical birth rate of 1.25 children born to a woman in her lifetime calculated in 2006 continue unchanged, the last Japanese will be born 953 years from now. Though few expect to live to verify it, many in Japan find such a prediction disquieting. Seventy-six per cent of the respondents to a Mainichi Shimbun poll ‘feel uneasy’ about the fact that social ageing continues and the population is beginning to decrease,² and a Nihon Keizai Shimbun poll found that 77 per cent consider population decline a ‘dark prospect’.³

Thus, the general awareness of population ageing and its many consequences is very high. The Japanese take an active interest in these issues because everyone is involved, in one way or another, or knows someone who is: someone who has seen an elementary school turned into a community centre for the elderly; someone who is overstretched trying to do justice to a care-dependent parent and a job; someone who is troubled by mounting medical costs and a stagnant retirement allowance; a couple who hesitate to have another child because they find tuition fees prohibitively expensive, even for one child. Politicians who call for pension reform and fail to pay their premiums do not escape media attention any more than elderly people who have no one to care for them and who, therefore, commit suicide.

It isn’t all calamity and discontent though. Japan’s demographic development has its bright side, too. Boasting the highest median age in the world is a huge accomplishment and proof of a successful society. The Japanese are not only old, but also healthy. Many elderly people now reap the fruits of a busy life, enjoying relatively carefree years of retirement in good health and without economic worries. Although in many individual cases there is hardship, the present generation of pensioners is overall well off. Many can afford a lifestyle that their parents never dreamt of, and they bequeath on their children unprecedented wealth. Japan is a very affluent society that allows its members to grow old in peace. They don’t die during the hazardous first years of their life, they don’t die of disease, they don’t die of war and violence, and they don’t die of smoking, alcohol or too much fatty food. These are reasons to be proud and happy.

Measured in terms of per capita national or domestic product, infant mortality, life expectancy, level of education, health care and employment, Japan compares favourably with most countries. In terms of life expectancy at birth, defined as the average number of years to be lived by a group of people born in the same year, if mortality remains constant, Japan is ahead of almost all countries globally. In the widely-quoted index of www.nationmaster.com it is ranked sixth with 81.15 years, but ranks 1 to 5 are occupied by realistically incomparable mini-states (Andorra, Macao, San Marion, Singapore and Hong Kong). Other big industrial nations, such as Germany (34), UK (38) and US (46) are found much lower down on the list.

Japan is also one of the world’s richest countries in terms of purchasing power parity. In the above-quoted nationmaster index it comes in twentieth, but if tax havens such as the British Virgin Islands, Guernsey, Jersey, Bermuda, San Marino and the Cayman Islands, as well as a number of small countries – in terms of population – such as Austria, Luxembourg, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland are discounted, it ranks among the top eight or five wealthiest countries in the world, depending on the index you consult. Japan has also been the world’s largest creditor nation for years. Not that this makes ‘Mr and Mrs Tanaka’ any richer, but it is an indication of the overall clout of the Japanese economy.

Yet, affluent and saturated though it is, happiness is not what comes to mind when characterizing Japanese society today. The fact that 95 per cent of the respondents of a 2003 attitude survey carried out by the Japan Broadcasting Corporation NHK’s Broadcasting Culture Research Institute ‘feel glad that they were born Japanese’⁴ can hardly be taken as an expression of life satisfaction or happiness, but rather suggests a strong sense of ethnic and national identity; that most people in Japan cannot imagine to live elsewhere and are content with their life compared with alternatives they do not know. According to the NHK survey, overall life satisfaction has been virtually stable over the two decades from 1983 to 2003, the bulk of 61 per cent of respondents reporting that they are ‘somewhat satisfied’ (yaya manzoku) with their life. It should be noted that this middle-of-theroad response is as indicative of Japanese attitudes toward happiness as a social value as it is of the happiness experienced by the Japanese. In international comparison, Japan is trailing most highly-developed nations, but also trails developing nations such as Venezuela, Indonesia and the Philippines.⁵ Cross-national and cross-cultural life satisfaction assessments are problematic because ‘the pursuit of happiness’ is not as universal a value as it would seem from a Western perspective. Yet Japan’s life satisfaction rating is lower than indices such as wealth, longevity, health and safety would predict. More telling than international comparisons is, perhaps, the fact that between 1998 and 2003, the ratio of Japanese who were not satisfied or felt unable to answer grew by three per cent.⁶

Given that there is a strong inclination to report a rather non-committal moderate degree of satisfaction (yaya manzoku), a three per cent decrease can easily be taken as an indication, if not of crisis, then of change. Many Japanese realize that it is becoming more difficult to maintain the high standard of living accomplished by the present generation of pensioners. Material affluence notwithstanding, they are worried by all sorts of concerns, real and imagined. The 1990s have seen bankruptcies, unemployment and homelessness on the rise, and suicide has become a pandemic. In 2003, 34,427 Japanese men and women⁷ took their own lives, a sad record after a decade of continuous rise. Incidences of suicide are highest among two groups – the elderly aged 60 years or older and people in debt: victims of success.

Discourse of change

The decrease in life satisfaction, though small in absolute terms, is indicative of a heightened sense of transition that took hold in Japan around the turn of the century. It engendered a discourse of change; a discourse about where Japan stands and in what direction she should go that is structured around a number of keywords and phrases that have captured the public consciousness. Some of these are:

• hyper-aged society;
• birth-rate decline (and countermeasures to this);
• age of population decline;
• trend of late marriage;
• equal gender participation;
• pension burden;
• gap (widening) society.

We will cover each in turn below.

Hyper-aged society (chōkōrei shakai)

The discourse about ageing Japan began in the 1980s. Professional demographers were aware of the coming problem earlier, but they failed to grasp the rapidity of Japan’s transformation from a young into an old society that, indeed, took many by surprise. When the conflagration of World War II was over, Japan’s median age was 22. At the time of writing (2006), it had risen to 43, having almost doubled in just 60 years. On this parameter Japan ranks second only behind Monaco, a place on the Mediterranean coast much preferred by wealthy retirees. A median age of 43 means that one half of the population are younger than 43 and one half older than that age. Many Japanese alive today can expect to see the median population age rise to 50 in their lifetime.⁸ Initially after the war, rapidly declining infant mortality rates contributed substantially to the ageing of society, but the growth in the younger-than-median-age half of the population were offset by decreasing fertility. For the past 30 years, Japan has been one of the top two or three countries for low infant mortality rate (2005: 3.26/1,000). Therefore, increases in median age are attributed largely to the growing life expectancy of the elderly, which in turn is reflective of dramatic advances in gerontologic medicine. In 1989, the elderly of 65 years and older accounted for 11.6 per cent of the Japanese population. Since then their proportion has reached 20 per cent, just one step short of the mark that indicates the transition from an aged to a hyper-aged society.

Definitions

• Ageing society: 7–14 per cent of the population are 65 years or older.
• Aged society: 14–21 per cent of the population are 65 years or older.
• Hyper-aged society: 21 per cent or more of the population are 65 years or older.

The fast pace of this development was reflected in public discourse, where the scientific terminology was swiftly picked up. A spot check of newspaper article headlines in mid-September preceding Respect-for-the-Aged day from 1980 to 2005 has revealed that the term kÜreika shakai (ageing society) was frequently used from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, when it was superseded by kÜrei shakai (aged society). The terms chÜkÜreika shakai and chÜkÜrei shakai (hyperageing society and hyper-aged society, respectively) began to appear in the late 1990s. These technical terms have thus found their way into public discourse suggesting that the Japanese have begun to think of themselves as an aged and even a hyper-aged society.

Birth-rate decline and countermeasures

As a complement to and component of the hyper-ageing aspect of population change, public discourse has focused on birth-rate decline (shÜshika taisaku). The number of babies born in Japan has been falling for 25 years. As a result, the demographic composition of the nation’s population has changed in such a way that the elderly, 65 years and over, now outnumber the population of children under 15. In 1950, the latter group accounted for 35.4 per cent of the population, the former for 4.9 per cent. By 2003, the child population was down to 14 per cent, while the aged population had risen to 19 per cent of the total population.⁹ Too few children are born in Japan. For some time, media attention was focused on the growing ranks of the elderly and how they change society, but then the tide turned and the other end of the demographic structure of society came into view; the dwindling number of babies. People are concerned. To be sure, there is the occasional dissenting voice. For example, sociologist Chizuko Ueno pointed out that birth rates in the ‘former Axis powers’, Japan, Germany and Italy, were among the lowest in the world. A fact, Ueno argues, that can be explained as the result of a ‘sub-conscious birth strike by women against machismo.’¹⁰ With less-opinionated zeal, though not quite politically correct, Manabu Akagawa enlivened the debate with his popular 2004 book entitled Fewer Children – so what! He argues that those who call for a policy of reversing birth rate decline are alarmist and misguided, as Japan’s demographic dynamics are not exceptional after all, but conform to a pattern typical of advanced nations. However, the public discourse about demographic issues is less influenced by international comparisons than by domestic ones. Thanks to persistent media coverage it is common knowledge that birth rates are much lower now than in the past, and there is wide agreement that this is a reason to be concerned.

Since 1947, Japan’s total fertility rate (TFR) dropped from 4.54 to 1.29 children born by a woman in her lifetime, far below population replacement level. As attested in an endless stream of articles and letters-to-the-editor in the daily press, many Japanese feel that deliberate countermeasures should be taken. In a 2004 opinion poll by Asahi Shimbun,¹¹ 78 per cent affirmatively answered the question of whether they took an interest in falling birth rates. At the same time, the question of whether it is easy to raise children in Japan today got a resounding ‘no’ of 74 per cent, and when asked whether raising chi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Population Decline and Ageing in Japan – the Social Consequences
• Routledge Contemporary Japan Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• A note on names and transcription
• 1 Facts and discourses
• 2 The problem of generations and the structure of society
• 3 Social networks
• 4 The lonely child
• 5 Women and men at work
• 6 The socialization of care
• 7 ‘Mature’ customers
• 8 Longevity risk and pension funds
• 9 Government of the elderly, by the elderly and for the elderly
• 10 Limits to ageing?
• 11 Immigrants welcome?
• 12 Population ageing and social change
• Notes
• References