Reconciling population and social expectations in Japan
Japan has been declared the world’s first ‘super-aged’ society and a ‘pioneer shrinking society’, rapidly inverting the demographic pyramid upon which the modern state has been built. Since 1989, when the low fertility rate of 1.57 became a major social concern, numbers have continued to trend downward. In June 2020, the Japanese government announced the preliminary results of the 2020 census revealing that the number of births in that year was the lowest on record. Government efforts since the mid-1990s...
