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So. A big, round-numbered and looming birthday is coming up in a few weeks. Not to give too much away, but in the month I was born, Momoe Yamaguchi Fuyu no Iro electrified the charts, The terror of Mechagodzilla was about to hit theaters, and Okinawa was busy making final preparations for Expo ’75.
There are different ways to put this grim milestone into context. I’m a year younger than Hello Kitty, a decade younger than Shinkansen bullet train and 100,000 years younger than Mount Fuji. I’m guessing they’re all still going strong, although no one is suffering from high cholesterol, the doleful feeling at rest, or the ever-louder click from the mileometer of missed opportunities.
But then I remember, more cheerfully, that this birthday will take place in creaky, aging Japan—a country where gray is the new black, lumbago the new “Lambada,” and 50 isn’t just the new 20, it’s more or less middle age.
Japan’s demography puts it on the global front, both of care home citizenship and youth erosion. In a crisis that both the public and private sectors are now simply calling “the 2025 problem,” the huge, 8-million-strong generation of post-war baby boomers born between 1947 and 1949 has moved from the category of merely “elderly” to “advanced elderly.” By 2030. By 2020, the government predicts, more than 8 million Japanese will be in some kind of caregiving role, 40 percent of whom will be doing actual work.
It’s impossible to miss. As of this year, one in five Japanese will be over 75, and nearly 30 percent of the population will be over 65. Demography, warn some economists, will cause as much devastation in Japan as the collapse of the property bubble of the 1980s. No population on Earth has ever been this old in this proportion to the rest of the population and with so many open questions about how they will cope. No such peaceful, healthy and well-nourished population has ever shrunk at such a rate. The numbers in Japan are economically, socially and existentially terrifying, but they don’t half make a 50-year-old feel young.
And besides being just another member of the average age, in theory all I have to do to counter the creeping downsides of old age is stay in Japan and hope the statistics take care of the practical side.
On paper, for example, I should become healthier. In 2023, after a three-year hiatus caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, Japan continued its decades-long pattern of increasing life expectancy. Japanese women lead the world in average longevity with a life expectancy of 87.14 years, but according to health ministry charts, a man my age can expect to live another 32.6 years.
The averages suggest that I will ride in it too. Reaching half a century in Japan, you enter a large “50+” segment of society that statistically amasses nearly 66 percent of the nation’s $7 trillion cash and deposit stock. That segment will now inherit properties that the very old will leave only to the very old.
And in general, at 50 you gain disproportionate political weight in Japan. Even in an already all-silver democracy, there are more 50-year-olds than any other group, and the country has held masterclass after masterclass in comparing fiscal largesse to electoral math. Dotage is votage.
People over 50 in Japan are the last generation to be net lifetime beneficiaries of government spending (in terms of education, health care, etc.) according to the Ministry of Finance. All the younger ones are in the red and will remain so until the heat death of the universe. And peripheral amenities are also good. By the time my generation needs one, the billions of taxpayer yen invested in the development of robot caregivers may have finally produced a half-decent Nurse-o-tron. Perhaps.
All of this, with the exception of increasing life expectancy, is pretty sad stuff. Promoting a healthy, happy old age is clearly a good thing. But there is a financial (260 percent gross national debt-to-GDP) and emotional (who’s going to take care of mom and dad) burden accumulated on younger generations that has quietly supported it and now looks utterly, alarmingly unbearable.
And that’s ultimately why Japan is, for all the wrong reasons, the perfect place to turn 50. As a nation, it’s a global pioneer not just in old age, but in the comforting mass delusion that it can get away with it. In an aging society, we are all technically getting younger. Relatively speaking.
Leo Lewis is the FT’s Tokyo bureau chief
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