The Human Tide

by Paul Morland

  Post-War Japan: Towards the World’s Oldest Country

  Immediately after the Second World War Japan experienced a remarkable baby boom. Both in absolute terms and relative to the baby booms of America and Western Europe, it was notable for its intensity, but even more so for its brevity. The birth rate, which had dropped below thirty per thousand in the late 1930s, rose to 34.3 in 1947.27 At this point (and now with reliable data to hand), total fertility in Japan was around four and a half, far above anything experienced in the West in the post-war period, after which it rapidly slumped.28 By the early 1950s it was already down to three and by the 1960s two. There was a small upward movement from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s, but the fertility rate never reached much above two, and then it fell again, slowly and steadily but to ever more exceptionally low levels, reaching 1.3 children per woman in the early years of the current century.29 Today, the latest UN data suggests an improvement but an extremely modest one, with a total fertility rate still below one and a half children per woman.30

  What had happened? The causes of this fall in fertility cannot be definitively determined in the case of Japan any more than they can elsewhere, but as elsewhere this very low fertility rate is correlated with rising income, urbanisation and increasing female education, particularly tertiary education. Compare female enrolment in higher education at below 5% in 1955, barely one-third of the male level, with around 50% forty years later, exceeding the male level.31 Where these factors are combined with traditional attitudes to women in the workplace and to family (in Japan only around 2% of children are born out of wedlock compared to nearly 50% in the UK), the pattern, as we have already seen, is one of low fertility. And while current Japanese rates are well below replacement level, they are no lower, and indeed slightly higher, than those observed in many countries in southern and eastern Europe. Overall, the pattern of fertility change resembles that of the West but, confirming the concept of an accelerating demographic whirlwind, is somewhat faster.

  The reasons for low fertility are of course impossible to establish with any certainty. Nonetheless there is much intriguing anecdotal evidence and comment on the subject. A demographer from Kobe University suggests:

  [I]f you are single, it is difficult to find a good and right partner for marriage. If you are married, and if both husband and wife work like this, there’s a slim chance to have a baby. No time or no energy left. If you want a baby, you (typically your wife) face a choice–continue to work or quit your job and have a baby. There’s a trade-off here.32

  As seen in Europe, in an era of female education and emancipation, cultures in which life is not made conducive for women to enter the workforce, to rise within it and to be able to combine its demands with those of childbearing and child-rearing will be countries with low fertility rates. It is hardly surprising therefore that the World Economic Forum consistently rates Japan one of the worst places in the developed world for economic equality in the workplace. One woman, Tomita, a thirty-two-year-old from Tokyo, describes an experience that may well be typical:

  [A] boyfriend proposed to me three years ago. I turned him down when I realised I cared more about my job. After that, I lost interest in dating. It became awkward when the question of the future came up… The bosses assume you will get pregnant. You have to resign. You end up being a housewife with no independent income. It’s not an option for women like me.33

  There are suggestions that young Japanese people are increasingly turning off sex and relationships and opting for more solitary pleasures, often involving some form of electronic gaming.34

  Besides its falling and then very low fertility rate, the second noteworthy feature of Japanese demography since the Second World War has been the extension of life expectancy. In the early 1950s it was already over sixty at birth, itself a great improvement on the level of a little over age thirty-five in much of the nineteenth century.35 The improvement continued with the benefits of increased urbanisation and industrialisation as the Japanese experienced improving diet, food storage, housing and health care. The main cause of death shifted from infectious diseases to chronic degenerative disease. Today life expectancy in Japan is over eighty-three. This is the highest of any UN member state and, of the territories covered by the UN, higher than any except Hong Kong, and the difference in life expectancy between Japan and Hong Kong is tiny. Japan’s life expectancy is not much short of five years ahead of the United States.36 Japanese women, who are now the longest-living group in the world, have enjoyed a life expectancy extension of three months every year for the past 160 years.37 Whatever its demographic difficulties (more on this shortly), Japan should be given credit for this extraordinary achievement. It can also boast one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world at around two per thousand compared to three in France and Germany and six in the USA.38

  With a flagging birth rate but mortality depressed by ever-longer life expectancy, Japan experienced a long period of population growth. Initially this was a standard case of demographic momentum, with a young population creating many births in absolute terms even if it was not reaching long-term replacement level, while the old are so relatively few that mortality is low. At some point this effect ceased to be the force behind the rise in population growth: instead population growth was fuelled by the fact that a relatively elderly population was succeeding in cheating death for longer and longer. Although additions to the population–births–were fewer and fewer, so were subtractions from it.

  The population of Japan kept growing into the twenty-first century despite the low birth rate, but at a decelerating rate. The average annual population growth was over 1% in the post-war period up to and including the late 1970s, halving in the 1980s and halving again in the 1990s; in the first decade of this century it was barely at a tenth of its post-war level, and total population finally peaked in 2012 at a little over 128 million.39 At this point natural population decline (deaths minus births, i.e. taking no account of migration) was over 200,000 per annum although the actual decline has been slightly slower due to modest net immigration.40 By the middle of this century Japan’s population may fall to 80 million, less than two-thirds of its current level.41 The mainstream UN forecast is that it will have lost a third of its population by the end of the current century. This population decline, although it has only just begun, has been coming for decades: the government was shocked when data for 1989 showed a fertility rate below that for the freak year 1966 when fertility was significantly depressed by the inauspicious horoscope of the ‘fiery horse’.42

  Japan is unlike other countries in several respects. Whereas the US and Western Europe have to some extent compensated for their impending population declines by importing immigrants from the Third World (and in the case of Western Europe, en masse from eastern Europe), with a corresponding impact on the ethnic composition of the population, this has not been something Japan has seriously contemplated, although there has been modest in-migration in recent years.

  If the sharp contrast between Japan and the West relates to immigration, the sharp contrast between Japan and Russia relates to life expectancy. Whereas Russia’s population decline has been precipitated by stubbornly high mortality compounding low fertility, in Japan’s case population decline has been delayed by ever-increasing life expectancy offsetting the low birth rate. If the Japanese had not managed to continue increasing life expectancy, their population decline would be faster. So Japan remains more or less ethnically homogeneous but is increasingly old.

  Japan is particularly interesting because it shows us a glimpse of a society with low fertility and an ageing population, and in this it is a pioneer. Such has been the speed of its demographic transition that it has overtaken Europe and the UK, despite starting behind them, particularly in the sphere of ageing. As the world’s population growth slows and faces possible reversal, so ageing is inevitable: Japan’s median age is now over forty-six, and this makes its population the world’s oldest along with Italy and Ger
many, and nearly nine years older than that of the United States.43 Its population has sometimes been the fastest ageing in recorded history;44 those aged over sixty-five rose from below one in twenty of the population in 1950 to over one in five in 2005.45 Between 2005 and 2015 alone, while the Japanese population as a whole levelled off, the number of its centenarians almost trebled.46

  This has given rise to the same ageing effects experienced in Europe, but more so. Whereas in Bulgaria and Italy it is the villages which are being depopulated, in Japan this has even started happening in some of the suburbs. This gives rise to an impending problem of physical decay. Japan already has 8 million empty homes. ‘Tokyo could end up being surrounded by Detroits,’ complains one real estate agent.47 The situation in the countryside is predictably worse, with not only wolves but also bears now roaming where schools once stood. Village children are now so few that they have to be bused over long distances.48 With historically small family sizes and many having had no children, it is estimated that up to 30,000 elderly Japanese die in their homes alone and, for a time at least, unnoticed. A whole industry has grown up around dealing with the removal and fumigation necessary when a body is found weeks or even months after death.49

  This dramatic greying of the Japanese population has significant economic consequences. As we saw in the context of the industrial revolution, the link between economics and population is not straightforward and usually works in two directions. Demographic change affects economic development and economic development affects demographic change. In the case of Japan as in that of the West, economic and population expansion arrived more or less simultaneously, and in the case of Japan, as in the case of Western countries, GDP rose as a result of both rising population, rising productivity and rising per capita income. This was true both after 1868 when Japan opened itself to the world and after 1945 when it enjoyed the demographic dividend of a fast-growing population but falling fertility, allowing increased workforce participation. What is striking was the way the country’s economic dynamism seemed to dry up at precisely the point when the share of its workforce-age population peaked.50

  Japan now faces unprecedented pressures on its pensions system, which was significantly reformed in 2004. The older population will also put pressure on elderly care (particularly in the absence of immigrant care workers) and health care expenditure. It seems likely that there is a relationship between the fact that Japan is the world’s oldest and most rapidly ageing country and that in 2015 it had by far the highest government debt–GDP ratio in the OECD at 248%, well ahead even of Greece and Italy at around 150% each.51

  Meanwhile, it is not just economics but also politics which is affected by ageing. We have seen the link between population growth and aggressive imperialism leading to Japan’s involvement in the Second World War. After its defeat in 1945, Japan pursued a more or less pacifist policy, sheltering under the wing of the United States from a defence perspective and, like Germany, avoiding both defence expenditure and projection of itself overseas. In 2005 it spent barely 1% of its GDP on defence, while the US spent 4% and the UK and France around 2.5%. However, perceptions of Japanese pacifism, at least from the Western perspective, have been linked to economic rather than military actions, with a rich literature up to the early 1990s suggesting that Japan’s economy and finance would be all-conquering. Much less has been heard on this topic since then, as the Japanese economy has gone from outperforming to underperforming by comparison with the economies of the West. In the 1970s and early 1980s, when fear of Japan’s impending global economic domination was at its peak, Japan’s population was just above half that of the United States. By 2015, when the Japanese menace seemed to have disappeared from popular discourse, it was around 40% and falling.52 Despite limited recent changes in military policy, it continues to rely essentially on the US for its defence, initially in the cold war context but now principally against a perceived threat from China. For Japan, demography and destiny seemingly cannot be untangled. With the expansionist years long behind it, the question will be how Japan copes with an increasingly old and, from now on, shrinking population. In this, being a trailblazer, it may have lessons for the rest of us.

  China: Towards the First Billion and Beyond

  China has undertaken some of the greatest engineering works in history to tame its rivers, bringing water and electricity to millions and displacing millions in the process. That China has also engaged in history’s most epic–and ultimately futile–effort to tame its human tide should come as no surprise.

  China long ago surpassed any other country for population size–although it is about to be eclipsed in this respect by India. By some measures it has already overtaken the United States in economic size–although clearly not on a per capita basis. This global population giant, so long said to be asleep, has in the past few decades become wide awake as its modernisation in scale, scope and speed has eclipsed anything the world has ever seen. China’s gargantuan population of around 1.5 billion makes it what it is today, and has played a central role in how it arrived at this point.

  China’s antiquity as a continuous state and people marks it out from Europe, whose states and nations post-date the first Chinese state by at least a millennium. China was the first country to pass the 1 billion population mark, a status it attained in the early 1980s. By dint of the scale of its population, it can only fail to be a major global political and economic entity in eras when it is in a particularly dire condition. China may have chosen not to project itself overseas after the fifteenth century, but it could not be dominated by any other power thanks to both its scale and relative technical advancement. Dynasties came and went, but even when they came from outside–such as the Manchu Qing–they were essentially co-opted into the system and the culture of China.

  By the nineteenth century, however, while still a demographic giant, China had failed to move forward with the dynamic momentum of Europe, either in demographic or industrial terms, and it paid a price that included the Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1856–60) and the putting down of the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1900). Why this was so is an intriguing question that has spawned a literature all of its own. Even a relative minnow, Japan, was able to replace Chinese dominance of Korea and rule of Taiwan from 1894 and to conquer and control large areas of China in the 1930s by dint not of absolute demographic advantage, but of a mixture of demographic and economic dynamism.

  Yet once China was able to combine size with industrial progress, it came to stand once again at the threshold of global power and with at least the potential to challenge the hegemony of the demographically smaller powers. In China’s case, its demographic forward movement (up to the 1970s) was achieved before its industrial progress (from the 1980s). Taken together, demographic and industrial momentum put it back at the centre of the international stage. The historical status and role of China owes much to the remarkable path of its demography.

  For Japan, 1945 makes sense as a ‘zero hour’. This was the year of its defeat at the hands of the Allies following nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the year from which, like Germany, it needed to start reconstructing itself from the rubble within a new international framework of US hegemony. For China, 1949 makes more sense as a starting point, the year of the ending of the civil war and the founding of the People’s Republic. (It is also the point at which the demographic data becomes more or less reliable.) However, it is not possible to get any kind of grasp of China’s demography and the role this played in its story without going back to an earlier age.

  An understanding of China’s demography in earlier periods is hampered, as elsewhere, by a paucity of definitive data. As a continuous state, albeit with the interruptions of dynastic changes, China does have official population data going back to the mid eighteenth century, and there are estimates of population based on official records at least as far back as the start of the Ming period in the second half of the fourteenth century.53 The reliability of much of this data is, howev
er, questionable. Comparing these to estimates further back, it appears that China’s population did not grow between the start of the Common Era and the middle of the seventeenth century, with a population of around 60 million both in the year AD 2 and the middle of the seventeenth century.54 Malthusians have identified five cycles of famine, epidemic and war operating during this period, cutting back the population, followed by regrowth up to what can be considered some kind of natural frontier.

  China, then, was remarkably different to Western Europe in that although suffering the same ups and downs over the long term, it experienced more than a millennium and a half without moving forward. This should not be seen as a sign of ‘backwardness’, however, since for most of this time China was technologically the most advanced part of the world; and for this reason the pattern should be seen in the reverse, as China having arrived at or somewhere near its own Malthusian frontier much earlier than the West, mastering the arts of irrigation and rice cultivation and the population density that this agricultural system can support. Indeed, Malthus recognised China as the archetype of a society which, lacking constraints, lived at the frontier of the highest population it could support and therefore at the frontier of misery and hunger.