Population decline | 人口減少
Japan is shrinking. The 2015 census results announced in February confirmed that the national population declined by nearly one million people in five years, “an unprecedented drop for a society not ravaged by war or other deadly crisis,” the New York Times reported.
Population decline is the essential trend necessary to understand Japan’s economic stagnation, deflation, and growing stock of empty homes. Decline is a result of rapid aging and falling numbers of births, a process known in Japanese as shoshi-koreika (少子高齢化) and often described as a “second demographic transition.” The first demographic transition — a population explosion that accompanies economic modernization, as increases in life expectancy outstrip decreases in the birthrate — occurred in Japan in the mid-20th century. The significance of the process currently unfolding comes into view when seen in the long-term context below.
Until 2000, the hockey-stick shape of the population graph resembles graphs of growth of atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and world GDP.
This shape is the footprint of the Anthropocene era that began with the rise of industrial capitalism some 200 years ago — an explosion of humans, and coinciding explosions in economic activity and impact upon the Earth’s environment. The sharp turn in Japan’s population trajectory suggests an ever-upward ascent may not be the end of our story.
Below are five things to understand about how population decline is impacting post-growth Japan, and other countries, in the 21st century.
- Population decline will be rapid
After recording a peak of 128,057,352 in the 2010 census, Japan's population has entered its long descent, but the pace of decline will remain slow until after the 2020 Olympics. But by the 2030s, nearly a million people — a population equivalent to Sendai, Niigata, or Kitakyushu — will disappear from the country every year.
2. Population decline is uneven
In May 2014, a government-appointed commission released a report containing future population projections for all of Japan’s 1700 municipalities. Nearly 900 were labeled “cities at risk of extinction,” meaning that the population of child-bearing age women is expected to decline by more than half by 2040. The hardest-hit regions are in the isolated mountains of central Kyushu, western Honshu, and the Kii Peninsula, and the entire northeast Tohoku and Hokkaido regions―an astonishing 24 of 25 municipalities in Akita Prefecture face potential “extinction.”
Even as many isolated areas begin re-wilding, unipolarization continues to drive a concentration of population and capital in the global economic center of Tokyo. Somewhere in between the extremes of growth and extinction lie the majority of Japanese cities, towns, and villages — marginal spaces where the inflationary pressure of growth has been replaced by the outward tide of deflation.
3. Population decline is inevitable
In 2015, the Japanese government announced a goal of maintaining a national population of at least 100 million — a threshold that will be breached in the 2040s if present trends prevail. The promise forms the basis for government projections about long term growth and the sustainability of social benefits, but is unlikely to be kept. Even an immediate recovery of the birth rate, which ticked up from 1.42 to 1.46 per woman in 2015, or an opening of large-scale immigration will not have a major impact in the near-term.
Declining birthrates are a near-universal phenomenon in the 21st century. “Peak population is probably much closer than most people think,” journalist Fred Pearce writes in his book The Coming Population Crash. “A declining global population by later this century looks increasingly inevitable. Falling fertility means that we will soon reach the point where each succeeding generation of mothers will be smaller than the last. The demographic momentum will then be negative rather than positive.”
Since 2014, the government has frequently cited a figure that it calls “desired fertility,” which suggests that Japanese women — if they were all able to get married and have economic security — actually want to have on average 1.8 children in their lifetime. However, because economic insecurity and lack of government support (see: daycare shortage) are the primary barriers for young people wishing to raise children, current growth-oriented economic policies and deregulation are unlikely to lead to dramatic improvements.
4. Tokyo is not invulnerable
The same process that is already transforming the countryside and regional cities will soon arrive in Tokyo. The capital is currently in the midst of a real estate boom anticipating the 2020 Olympic Games, but soon after the festivities end, the gravity of depopulation is expected to cause drastic deflation of real estate value.
The drastic difference in the context of the 1964 Games and 2020 Games can be observed in the maps below, which show population growth rates in Tokyo’s 23 central wards. Whereas the last Olympics was held at the height of Japan’s economic miracle and Tokyo’s explosive growth (and suburbanization, hence the declines in central Tokyo), the next Olympics will arrive during the city’s transition to population decline.
This post-Olympic future is referred to in the media as the “2020 Problem,” with predictions that new condo buildings will soon see their prices plummet as supply begins to outstrip demand in the next decade. Some expect Tokyo real estate prices will decline by 38% by 2030. In any case, steady deflation of real estate and consumer prices is a near certainty as population decline accelerates.
5. There will always be children
Despite provocative warnings, population decline does not mean Japan will go extinct. Even if population decline is not arrested in coming decades, the ratio of residents over 75 will eventually stabilize at around 25%, while children under 19 will stay around 12.5%. Such a population structure would (and already is) necessitating many healthy elderly people to remain productive later into life, but with people living longer than ever, this may not be a bad outcome. There will be life after growth.
