Government Confirms Demographic Emergency Requires Urgent Action Over the Next Twenty-Five to Thirty Years, to Be Implemented Carefully and With Appropriate Consultation
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
TOKYO, JAPAN — The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare released its annual demographic report confirming that Japan’s population of people aged 80 and over now exceeds its population of people under 14 for the second consecutive year, a demographic milestone that ministry officials described as “a significant policy challenge requiring coordinated national response” and that demographers at the University of Tokyo described as “a situation that has been described as a significant policy challenge requiring coordinated national response for approximately thirty years, during which the coordination has been ongoing and the response has been incremental.” Japan’s total fertility rate stands at 1.2 children per woman, the lowest ever recorded, and the country’s total population has declined for seventeen consecutive years. The government has convened a council to study the issue. The council will report its findings within eighteen months.
What Japan Has Tried and What Has Happened
Japan has implemented a succession of policies designed to address its demographic decline since the 1990s, including expanded childcare provision, incentives for employers to offer parental leave, cash payments to families for each child born, regional revitalisation programmes designed to distribute population growth beyond Tokyo, and an immigration expansion that is significant by historical Japanese standards and modest by the standards of countries that have used immigration to offset demographic decline. The results have been positive at the margin and insufficient at the scale required. Childcare availability has improved significantly; take-up of parental leave by fathers has increased from negligible to modest. The cash payment per birth has increased multiple times; the fertility rate has continued to decline. Immigration has increased; the net migration numbers remain far below what would be required to stabilise population without cultural and social changes that Japanese society is processing at its own pace, which is deliberate.
The Economic Implications and Why They Cannot Be Deferred Indefinitely
Japan’s demographic situation has direct economic implications that policy analysts describe with increasing urgency and that Japanese policymakers describe with careful measured language that conveys urgency without producing panic. The working-age population that supports pension and healthcare systems for retirees is shrinking relative to the retiree population it supports, a ratio that the Nippon.com data service documents in annual updates showing steady deterioration. Productivity improvements and longer working lives can partially offset this decline — Japan has made significant progress on both, with labour force participation among older workers among the highest in the OECD — but cannot fully offset a demographic shift of the scale Japan is experiencing. The International Monetary Fund has repeatedly noted Japan’s demographic challenge in its Article IV consultations, recommending structural reforms to the pension system, healthcare financing, and labour market to address long-term fiscal sustainability. Japan has implemented reforms in each of these areas. The recommendations continue to recur in subsequent Article IV reports, suggesting the reforms have been necessary but not sufficient, which is the kind of sentence that appears in IMF consultations about Japan with a frequency that suggests the organisation is running out of ways to say it.
Why Japan Is Polite About a Crisis That Requires Impolite Solutions
The most challenging dimension of Japan’s demographic situation is not the mathematics, which are well understood, but the cultural and political dynamics that shape what responses are available. Immigration at the scale required to stabilise Japan’s population would require accepting cultural change at a pace and extent that significant portions of Japanese society are not prepared for. Policies to increase fertility would require changes to gender roles, workplace culture, and housing economics that face resistance from multiple directions simultaneously. Pension reform that more equitably distributes demographic costs across generations would require imposing costs on older voters who are the most reliable electoral constituency in a country with an ageing electorate. All of these things are true simultaneously. The council that will report in eighteen months knows all of this. Its report will be thoughtful, comprehensive, and carefully worded. The demographic trend will continue while it is being written.
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The council meets Tuesdays. NewsThump has also convened a council and will report back.
Immigration as a Demographic Variable and Why Japan Has Not Used It at Scale
The comparison that demographers most frequently make when discussing Japan’s demographic situation is with Germany, which has accepted large-scale immigration over the past decade — particularly during the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis and subsequent periods — and has maintained a more stable working-age population as a result, at the cost of significant social and political friction that produced the rise of the AfD and a sustained political debate about integration that Germany is still managing. Japan’s government has observed Germany’s experience and drawn from it a conclusion that is different from the conclusion that demographers draw. Demographers conclude that immigration works to stabilise demographic decline when integration systems are adequate and political will is sustained. Japanese policymakers have concluded that the political and social costs of the scale of immigration required are higher than the political costs of managed demographic decline, and have opted for the latter. Whether this is the right trade-off depends on value judgments that are genuinely contested and that Japanese society is making, deliberately and over time, in its own way and at its own pace, without particular regard for what demographers or foreign journalists recommend.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/japan-aging-population-over-80-under-14/
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