This article calls it a "quiet emergency" but even as a foreigner living in Japan there are alarm bells everywhere. And the government buying 150 F35's is just a slap in the face when there's a massive chunk of the population that is, very quickly, going to need extra care.

I looked into becoming a care aid myself as I'm tired of office culture in Japan and have some experience in that field. I was shocked to see that they start at less than 10USD, and working your way up takes years, decades even.

Continuing to kick this can down the road is going to be an absolute disaster.

“A government audit of family registries in Japan in 2010 uncovered more than 230,000 people listed as being aged 100 or older who were unaccounted for, some having died decades previously. The miscounting was attributed to patchy record-keeping and suspicions that some families may have tried to hide the deaths of elderly relatives in order to claim their pensions“ Thus they need to redo the audit in 2026.

Wild that the article goes on about the percentage of centenarians, then just has this brief note about how the data are completely unreliable, and never squares the two sets of statements.

The secret to extreme long life is bad record keeping.

Years ago people warned that we had to limit the population to save the planet.

Now we're naturally reducing population growth, and people warn of disaster.

Gradually decreasing populations means that overall, fewer workers have to support more non-workers. We've had decades of productivity growth, with more to come if we're not stupid, making that extremely feasible.

Semi-related, but I did recently wonder if China's real-estate bust might serve as a strong fertility support measure / incidental pronatalist policy.

Tier-3 and tier-4 cities supposedly saw 30-50% property value declines, setting them back more than two decades. If real estate was really holding back families, as is often stipulated, this might reverse that.

Otoh, rural Japan has lots of cheap or even free real estate but it doesn't seem to support fertility rates at all.

How common is pension fraud in Japan?

Japan has a 55% top marginal inheritance tax rate.

I wonder how many of these centenarians aren't actually alive and their just deaths haven't been reported so that the family can avoid paying that.

  centenarians per 10,000
  Japan   8.8
  France  6.3
  Italy   3.6
  Canada  3.2
  US      3.0
  UK      2.4  
  Germany 2.2
  Russia  0.9
  China   0.3
  India   0.2

What are Japan and France doing so much better?

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"Residents aged 65 and older currently make up around 30% of the population and are expected to make up nearly 40% by 2070."

that is insane, having half of population is aging grandma is absolutely mind blowing

The more salient point is why is this happening.

That is to say, it also mean less and less younger people, as 'modernity' induces fewer marriages and fewer children.

Isn’t this often attributed to social security fraud? The family member dies, but the checks keep getting cashed.

Probably not. Welfare fraud is really common and the government hasn’t really done much to combat it. This article makes it sound like this is clerical error driven but the stories in the news say otherwise.

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88% are women.

In America too!

Obligatory note about most centenarians not having verifiable birth records.

The blue zone.

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We have travelled for about a month in Japan last year. They work under constant stress, lots of commute on public transit. I also did not feel their food was that healthy, lots of fried food and sweets. But the portion is small compared to what we would normally eat in a meal.