Census confirms that Japan's population is shrinking
1 million decline in 5 years
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Summary
Official census figures confirmed on Friday that the population shrank by nearly a million during the last half-decade. This is an unprecedented drop for a society not ravaged by war or other deadly crisis. It was the first time since Japan began collecting census data in 1920 that a nationwide count recorded a decline in the population.
Japan has seen this milestone coming for years, if not decades. Yet efforts by the government to encourage women to have more children have had little effect. “These numbers are like losing an entire prefecture,” Shigeru Ishiba, a cabinet minister in charge of efforts to revitalize Japan’s especially depopulated rural areas.
The population is shrinking more in some places than others. The biggest cities, like Tokyo, are still growing, while rural areas struggle to cope with abandoned homes and shuttered shops. The imbalance has created political tensions: The most depopulated areas send three times as many representatives to Parliament, per capita, as urban ones do.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe responded to the census report by reiterating a long-term goal of keeping the population from falling below 100 million. Mr. Abe’s goal depends on raising the birthrate to 1.8 children per woman, up from 1.4 now and higher than it has been since the early 1980s.
The real problem one-quarter of Japanese are now over 65, and that percentage is expected to reach 40 percent by 2060. Pension and health care costs are growing even as the workers needed to pay for them become scarcer.