The Aging Population of Japan: Causes, Expected Challenges and Few Possible Recommendations

Abstract

The fertility rate of Japan is decreasing below the threshold levels. The balance between aged peoples (65≤) and newborn has been tilted to the former side and the ratio of old population is increasing very rapidly. These demographic changes are expected to cause many serious problems containing reduction in working age population, increase in the dependency ratio, predicament in public pension system, economic downturn and loss of societal vitality. Probably, there are also challenges of over and saturation in certain fields as the youth has more motivation towards applied sciences and technology than natural and social sciences at current times. In order to have a sustainable development, there is need for immigrant workforce. At the same time it is also essential to use the indigenous potential in the most effective way. It is expected that the results of this study will possibly be helpful for understanding and making policies to counter the problem of aging and field over or under saturation. The population data has been obtained from Institute of Population and Social Security Research. For this study, youth of Yamaguchi University and workers of different private industries of Yamaguchi city have been studied through questionnaires and interviews. The age of youth for study ranges from 20 to 24 years and the age of workers in the private industry lies between the 28 to 33 years. The general tendency of fresh blood for the marriage, its expected age and number of children after marriage has been observed. A study is also carried out to observe the deciding study year for the future field selection in the young peoples. The results of the study showed that about 95 % of youth in Yamaguchi University is in the demand of spouse mostly at the age between 27 to 30 years and the same percentage also wants to have children after marriage. Nearly 57% of youth want to have 2, 29% want to have 3, 7 % want to have 4 kids and same percentile of 7 do not want baby. The deciding class for future field selection is 2^nd and 3^rd grade of high school. For marriage or children, the major discouraging reasons for the persons working in private industry seems the economic constraints related to the limited number of jobs in government sectors and strict rules and limited salary of private sectors. The women working in the private industry feel no flexibility and security of job in case of child bearing. Also the other reasons can be the unavailability of baby day care and old aged houses. On the basis of this study, it is recommended to have some legislation to provide flexibility and encouragement to the women for children bearing who are working the private industry and also to increase the number of baby day care and old aged houses. It is also suggested to launch some informative courses for the scope and future job availability of different fields at the 2^nd and 3^rd grade of high school.