Japan held its quinquennial census last year (that's every five years, Ciara. No need to look it up), and the initial results were released last month.
(One of the incidental pleasures of same was when I got to tick both the 'head of household' and 'home-owner' boxes. Ahh, the sense of proprietary).
According to the survey there are now 128, 057, 352 people living in Japan. Surprising as this may seem, this actually a (very) slight increase of nearly 30,000 people from the previous census in 2005. However, this increase is attributed directly to a rise in the foreign population resident in Japan. Yes, us gaijin are all that is stopping Japan from slipping down the demographic sinkhole. Since the previous survey, the number of big hairy foreigners has increased by 5.8% to 1,648,037 people, which is less than 2% of the total population, but still dizzyingly cosmopolitan for Japan.
The actual number of rice-munching Japanese declined by 0.3%, the first time this has happened since the census began. Although is only a slight decline, it masks marked differences in regional demographics. Whereas Tokyo has seen an increase of over 580,000 people, Hokkaido by contrast has seen the greatest decline in population among Japan's 47 prefectures, with the disappearance of nearly 122,000 people.
Although some of this is due to a natural decline, a significant proportion can be attributed to people leaving Hokkaido to live elsewhere in Japan. The vast majority of the students here in the university, for instance, come from Hokkaido, but upon graduation more than 90% of them will leave the island to look for work elsewhere in Japan. Not many of them, I suspect, will return in the future.
Indeed, one of the most distinctive features about Japan's declining demographics is the ongoing internal migration that is taking place, which is resulting in the accelerated depopulation of many rural areas, and indeed, urban areas too. Again, to take some examples from Hokkaido: the village of Shimukappu, in the mountainous centre of the island, saw its population plummet by 23.4% in five years. Should that level of decline continue, the place will be empty by 2025.
For the urban example I will use Muroran. Back in 1969 during the steel town's heyday, the population peaked at 183,000. Then one of the large steel mills closed down in '73 and after that we became a Bruce Springsteen song. According to the 2010 census, the town's population has almost halved to 94,000 and continues to decline on by more than a thousand people a year. And of those 94,000, nearly a third of them are over the age of 65 which means that an increasing amount of the city's budget goes on pension and social welfare and health support for this group while other areas are severely reduced or cut outright. To give a personal example, the hoikusho (nursery) Cian attends, is due to close next year and be merged with another one some 3km's away as the town can't afford to keep both open.
Feckers.
Nor is there any end in sight; in fact it may well just be 'the end' for many towns and villages across Japan. Short of the government erecting a Statue of Liberty in Tokyo Bay and asking the world to send us 'your poor, huddled masses', then those quinquennial censuses are going to be filled in by less and less people.
The actual number of rice-munching Japanese declined by 0.3%, the first time this has happened since the census began. Although is only a slight decline, it masks marked differences in regional demographics. Whereas Tokyo has seen an increase of over 580,000 people, Hokkaido by contrast has seen the greatest decline in population among Japan's 47 prefectures, with the disappearance of nearly 122,000 people.
Although some of this is due to a natural decline, a significant proportion can be attributed to people leaving Hokkaido to live elsewhere in Japan. The vast majority of the students here in the university, for instance, come from Hokkaido, but upon graduation more than 90% of them will leave the island to look for work elsewhere in Japan. Not many of them, I suspect, will return in the future.
Indeed, one of the most distinctive features about Japan's declining demographics is the ongoing internal migration that is taking place, which is resulting in the accelerated depopulation of many rural areas, and indeed, urban areas too. Again, to take some examples from Hokkaido: the village of Shimukappu, in the mountainous centre of the island, saw its population plummet by 23.4% in five years. Should that level of decline continue, the place will be empty by 2025.
For the urban example I will use Muroran. Back in 1969 during the steel town's heyday, the population peaked at 183,000. Then one of the large steel mills closed down in '73 and after that we became a Bruce Springsteen song. According to the 2010 census, the town's population has almost halved to 94,000 and continues to decline on by more than a thousand people a year. And of those 94,000, nearly a third of them are over the age of 65 which means that an increasing amount of the city's budget goes on pension and social welfare and health support for this group while other areas are severely reduced or cut outright. To give a personal example, the hoikusho (nursery) Cian attends, is due to close next year and be merged with another one some 3km's away as the town can't afford to keep both open.
Feckers.
Nor is there any end in sight; in fact it may well just be 'the end' for many towns and villages across Japan. Short of the government erecting a Statue of Liberty in Tokyo Bay and asking the world to send us 'your poor, huddled masses', then those quinquennial censuses are going to be filled in by less and less people.
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