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So. A big, round, serious Christmas is coming in a few weeks. I don't want to reveal too much, but the month I was born in, Momoi Yamaguchi's birth month Fuyu no Iro He was electrifying the plans, Mechagodzilla terror The film was about to hit theaters, and Okinawa was busy with last-minute preparations for Expo '75.
There are different ways to put this dismal landmark into context. I'm a year younger than Hello Kitty, and a decade younger than Hello Kitty Shinkansen bullet train It is 100,000 years younger than Mount Fuji. I suppose all of them are still going strong, though none of them are bothered by high cholesterol, saddened by their resting rate, or tapped ever louder by the distance of missed opportunities.
But then I remember, even more happily, that this Christmas will take place in shabby, dilapidated Japan — a land where gray is the new black, back pain is the new lambada, and 50 is not just the new 20, but in one form or another. Average age.
Japan's paradoxical demographics place it on the global frontline of foster care citizenship and the erosion of youth. In a crisis now referred to simply by both the public and private sectors as the “2025 problem,” the giant generation of eight million post-war baby boomers born between 1947 and 1949 has moved from the category of “old people” only to the category of “old people.” “Applicants”. “Big.” By 2030, the government expects that more than eight million Japanese people will be performing some type of caregiving role, 40 percent of whom will have an actual job.
Impossible to miss. As of this year, one in five Japanese people will be over 75 years old, and about 30 percent of the population will be over 65 years old. Some economists warn that demographics are about to wreak as much havoc on Japan as the collapse of the asset bubble in the 1980s. No population on Earth has ever reached this age in proportion to the rest of the population and with so many open questions about how to cope. The population of peaceful, healthy, well-nourished people has never shrunk at this rate. The numbers in Japan are economically, socially and existentially terrifying, but they don't make a 50-year-old feel young.
Besides being just another member of the middle-aged group, in theory, all I need to do to combat the encroaching downsides of age is stay in Japan and hope the statistics take care of the practical side.
On paper, for example, I should get healthier. In 2023, after a three-year hiatus due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Japan resumed its multi-decade pattern of raising life expectancy. Japanese women lead the world in terms of longevity with an average life expectancy of 87.14 years, but according to Ministry of Health figures, a man my age can expect to live another 32.6 years.
The averages suggest I would trade it too. When one reaches half a century in Japan, you are approaching the large “over-50s” segment of society that statistically stores approximately 66 percent of the country's $7 trillion stock of cash and deposits. This part will now inherit properties that leave very old properties for very old properties.
More generally, being 50 gives you disproportionate political weight in Japan. Even in a truly silver democracy, there are more people over 50 than any other group, and the country has offered masterclass after masterclass in reconciling fiscal generosity with electoral arithmetic. Dementia is a vote.
People over 50 in Japan are the last generation who, according to the Ministry of Finance, have been net beneficiaries throughout their lives of state expenditures (in terms of education, health care, etc.). Everyone younger is in the red and will remain so until the heat death of the universe. Terminal perks are good too. By the time my generation needs one, the billions of taxpayer yen spent on developing caregiving robots may have finally produced a semi-decent nurse. maybe.
Obviously, all of this, except for higher life expectancy, is very dismal. Promoting healthy and happy aging is an obvious good thing. But there are financial burdens (gross national debt to GDP ratio of 260%) and emotional burden (who will take care of mom and dad) piled on younger generations that have quietly supported this, and now seem completely unsustainable, to a worrying extent.
This is ultimately why, for the wrong reasons, Japan is the perfect place to turn 50. As a country, it is a world leader not only in being old, but also in the comfortable collective illusion of its ability to get away with it. In an aging society, we are all technically younger. relatively.
Leo Lewis is the Tokyo bureau chief of the Financial Times
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