[Grandpa's Various Thoughts] Child population (under 15) declining for 42 consecutive years!?
My heart is Gen Z! My body is a Showa-era person past sixty! I am Grandpa, a supporter of Gen Z!?
Ahead of Children's Day on May 5th, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications announced the 'Number of Children as of April 1, 2023 (population under 15 years old; the same applies below)' on May 4th.
Many of you may have read the article in the newspaper, but it seems this is the 42nd consecutive year of decline.
I have included the announcement article from the Statistics Bureau of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications below, so please read the full text if you like.
The graph above makes the trend of the population under 15 easy to understand, doesn't it?
If you look at this in numbers👇, it is quite a big shock.
In 1960, the year I was born, the number of children was 28.07 million, and children under 15 accounted for 30% of the total population. By 2023, that has dropped to 14.35 million, or 11.5% of the total.
42 consecutive years of decline means that after peaking in 1981, the numbers have been falling since 1982.
People are making a fuss now saying it's a crisis, but why do you think the seriousness of this hasn't come to light until now?
That becomes clear when you look at the graph introduced in this article.
Even after the decline in the child population began in 1982, Japan continued to see an upward trend in the total population due to increased longevity, even without an increase in the number of children.
Even though the population decline had started, it progressed very slowly at first, so the major impact was hard to see on the surface, which is why people didn't make a big fuss about it.
But from now on, the speed of population decline will increase. Once the era arrives where the baby boomer generation passes away in large numbers, the population will continue to decrease significantly even if a few more children are born.
👆 Only Drucker foresaw the future of population decline, and as a future that has already happened, he left the following passage in a 1991 paper.
The developed countries are in a process of collective suicide.
For the citizens of the developed countries are not producing enough babies to reproduce themselves. And the reason for this is very clear.
The young can no longer bear the 'increasing burden' of having to support an ever-growing number of elderly, non-working people.
Drucker clearly answers what must be done because of this, but Japan has turned its back on those recommendations for the past 30-plus years.
However, although it is finally getting late, it seems the time has come for Japan to seriously change.
Good luck, Gen Z!
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