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So. A big, round-numbered, menacing birthday is coming up in a few weeks. Not to give too much away, but in the month I was born, by Momoe Yamaguchi Fuyu no Iro was electrifying the signs, The terror of Mechagodzilla was about to hit theaters, and Okinawa was making last-minute 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 the Shinkansen bullet train, and 100,000 years younger than Mount Fuji. I think all of these are still going strong, although no one is worried about high cholesterol, aggravating resting rates or the ever-increasing click of the milometer of missed opportunities.
But then I remember, more happily, that this birthday will take place in aging, creaky Japan—a land where gray is the new black, lumbago is the new Lambada, and 50 isn’t just the new 20, but more or less. average age.
Japan’s candlestick demographics at both ends place it on the global frontline of homegrown citizenship and youth erosion. In a crisis now simply referred to by the public and private sectors as the “2025 problem,” the giant, 8 million generation of post-war baby boomers born between 1947 and 1949 have moved from the category of merely “elderly” to ” advanced”. elderly”. By 2030, the government predicts, more than 8 million Japanese will be in some kind of caregiving role, 40 percent of those currently holding a job.
It is impossible to lose. By this year, one in five Japanese will be over 75, and almost 30 percent of the population will be over 65. Demographics, some economists warn, will wreak as much havoc on Japan as the collapse of the asset bubble of the 1980s. No population on Earth has ever been so old relative to the rest of the population, and with so many open questions. how he will cope. No population so peaceful, healthy and well-nourished has ever shrunk at such a rate. Japan’s numbers are economically, socially and existentially dire, but they don’t make half a 50-year-old feel young.
And besides being another member of the middle age group, in theory all I have to do to counteract the downsides of age is stay in Japan and hope the statistics take care of the practical side.
On paper, for example, I need to become healthier. In 2023, after a three-year hiatus caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, Japan resumed its decades-long pattern of advancing life expectancy. Japanese women lead the world in life expectancy at 87.14 years, but according to health ministry charts, a man my age can expect to live another 32.6 years.
Average suggests I’ll get into it too. Reaching half a century in Japan, you enter the large “over 50” segment of society that statistically amasses almost 66 percent of the country’s $7 trillion in cash and deposits. That segment will now inherit properties left too old just old enough.
And in general, being 50 gives you disproportionate political weight in Japan. Even in what is now an all-silver democracy, there are more 50-year-olds than any other group, and the country has offered masterclass after masterclass in matching fiscal glory with electoral math. Dotage is vote.
The over-50s in Japan are the last generation that, according to the finance ministry, has been a lifetime net beneficiary of government spending (in terms of education, health care, etc.). All the youngest are in red and will remain so until death by the heat of the universe. And the peripheral benefits are good too. By the time my generation needs one, the billions of taxpayer yen poured into the development of caregiving robots may have finally produced a half-decent nurse. Maybe.
All of this, with the exception of increased life expectancy, is definitely a shame. Promoting a healthier and happier age is an obvious good. But there is a financial (260 percent gross national debt to GDP) and emotional (who’s going to look after mum and dad) burden on the younger generations that has quietly supported this and now seems utterly unbearable.
And that’s ultimately why Japan, for all the wrong reasons, is the perfect place to turn 50. As a nation, it is a global pioneer not only of being old, but of the comforting mass illusion that it can get away with it. In an aging society, we are all getting technically younger. Relatively speaking.
Leo Lewis is the FT’s Tokyo bureau chief
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