Demographic Data Japan's population of people aged 100 or older has reached a record high of more than 95,000, according to statistics released by the government on Tuesday.
According to According to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, as of September 1, 2024, the number of people aged 100 or older is 95,119, an increase of 2,980 from 2023.
Of the centenarians, 83,958 were women and only 11,161 were men. One of the women is Tomiko Itooka, who is currently the oldest centenarian in the world at 116 years old. Received She received her Guinness World Records certificate on Monday, which is a national holiday in Japan called Respect for the Aged Day.
Tomiko was born on May 23, 1908, and was 32 when Japan entered World War II. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, she is the 23rd oldest person in human history.
Japan's oldest man, 110-year-old Kiyotaka Mizuno said Speaking to reporters on Monday, he said he didn't know how he'd lived so long, and that a typical day for him involves waking up at 6:30 a.m., eating three meals a day “without being picky about food,” and listening to sumo wrestling on the radio.
Looking away from centenarians, Japan currently has 36.25 million people aged 65 or older, accounting for 29.3% of the population, the highest level for a populous country in the world.
While it is a wonderful thing to have such a large elderly population in a culture that respects the elderly, it also portends a demographic crisis for Japan. Unfortunately, while there are many elderly people, the number of young workers generating income for the social security system is insufficient and declining.
The entire population of Japan is rejection Japan's birth rate has been steadily declining for the past 13 years, and is set to fall by a further 595,000 in 2024. Births in the first half of 2024 will be 6% lower than in 2023, the lowest level since publication of birth rates began in 1969. Currently, the birth rate is 1.2 children per woman, which is Better That's better than South Korea's dismal 0.78 per woman, but still well within crisis levels.
To make up for the shortage of young people, older people are staying in the workforce longer, with the number of older people on Japanese corporate payrolls set to hit a record 9.14 million by 2024. Japanese authorities predict that even this temporary measure to shore up the workforce will start to fail within the next decade.
The Japanese government recognizes the declining and aging population as an urgent crisis that “must be resolved now or it will be impossible to solve,” and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has put A population increase is expected in January 2023, but like other Asian “tiger” economies facing population declines, nothing seems to help. Like many of its neighbors, Japan has resisted using mass immigration to boost its labor force, but no amount of economic stimulus packages or preferential childcare benefits has been enough to convince young people in Japan to have the number of children needed to feed the growing population.
Report Published A report released at the Japan Demographics Symposium in April predicted that if the population continues to decline at the current rate, 744 of Japan's 1,729 municipalities will “disappear” by 2050. By 2100, Japan's total population will be roughly half of what it was in 2000.
