With contributions from around 370 celebrities, intellectuals and cultural figures of the time, the April 1920 edition of the now defunct Nihon Oyobi Nihonjin (Japan and the Japanese) magazine ran a special feature on what the country would look like in 100 years.

Sakio Tsurumi, then-director of the government’s Forestry Bureau, predicted that the nation’s population would grow nearly five-fold to around 260 million by 2020, approximately double what it actually is now. Professor Riichiro Hoashi of Waseda University expected the majority of government spending to concentrate on education, when in fact the aging population has seen social security fees soar. Yaichiro Isobe, chairman of the Kokumin Eigakukai English school, wrote that kanji would be abolished and English adopted as Japan’s second official language, a far cry from the linguistic realities in Japanese classrooms and offices today.

Not all prophecies were entirely off the mark, however. As physician Rinketsu Shikitsu speculated, the average Japanese life expectancy has indeed reached 80 to 90 years thanks to developments in medicine and hygiene (as opposed to around 42 and 43 years in the early 1920s). And technology has allowed for the generation and storage of electricity produced from solar energy — something civil engineer Ayahiko Ishibashi foresaw.

Nevertheless, predicting the future is no easy feat. A wide array of scenarios need to be factored in: technological advancements, evolving geopolitics, conflicts, epidemics, natural disasters and environmental changes, to name a few. They all play a role in how societies unfold, and there’s always the unexpected

Perhaps among the more foreseeable and frequently cited long-term phenomena affecting the world is climate change. By 2100, for example, the average temperature in cities across the United States could be about 8 degrees Fahrenheit (4.4 degrees Celsius) higher, according to Climate Central.

Arguably, the most pressing issue facing Japan, an island nation of 124 million people of which 29.1% are 65 or older, is its rapidly graying and shrinking population, a demographic crisis whose urgency and future ramifications professor Tomoya Mori of Kyoto University believes are underestimated among the country’s policymakers and, more broadly, the general public.

“There’s been a lot of talk about carbon neutrality and global warming, and many are aware of this as their own personal problem, but I believe Japan’s population decline will be even more serious, and no action has been taken to deal with it,” he tells The Japan Times.

By creating a statistical model based on data from the past 50 years and incorporating factors including population decrease, urbanization trends and changes in transportation and communication costs, Mori has simulated how Japanese cities might look in 2120 when the population is expected to — in the worst-case scenario — plunge to less than a third of what it is today.

“This fall will have an equal or greater adverse impact than global warming,” he says. “Since my expertise is urban economics, my objective was to show the specific effects of the demographic decline in hopes that it will raise wider awareness.”

Vanishing points

The signs of a graying, shrinking population can be observed most starkly in the countryside.

In Nanmoku, for example, a village nestled in the mountains of Gunma Prefecture, 67.5% of its diminishing number of residents are 65 or older, the highest ratio among all municipalities in Japan. Meanwhile, abandoned hamlets dot the hilly forests of Chichibu, Saitama Prefecture — bittersweet remnants of rural flight and depopulation, and a phenomenon so widespread that exploring them has become a subculture of its own.

The number of vacant homes, in fact, has grown to an estimated 9 million as of October last year, according to an internal affairs ministry survey, doubling from 4.48 million in 1993. And by 2050, 744 of Japan’s 1,729 municipalities might vanish due to a sharp population decline, according to a report released by the Population Strategy Council in late April.

While that private panel of academics and business leaders has proposed that Japan should aim to have a stable population of 80 million by 2100 in order to maintain economic growth, Mori doubts that’s possible. And he says the demographic drain, its impact now most pronounced in the rural corners of the nation, will gradually manifest itself in urban centers.

The latest long-term projections by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research give an estimated population of around 71 million, 50 million and 36 million in 2120, in order of high-, medium- and low-fertility scenarios. Mori says he believes the current chronically low birth rate and a lack of plausible initiatives to reverse the trend will likely see Japan’s population edge toward the lower end of the estimates.

“If the population fell to the 30 million level, that’s about the same as during the Edo Period (1603-1868),” he says. “Some may say, ‘OK then, things were manageable back then, no big deal.’ But don’t forget that our current infrastructure is based on a population of roughly 130 million.”

In February, Mori released a discussion paper titled “The Rise and Fall of Cities under Declining Population and Diminishing Distance Frictions: The case of Japan,” a study using a spatial statistical model to forecast the future geographic distribution of the population at the 1-kilometer grid level.

The model was developed based on economic agglomeration, a theory predicting that reduced transportation costs due to technological advancement will facilitate the concentration of population into larger and fewer cities. The paper also identifies each city as an urban agglomeration with a population density of at least 1,000 per 1 square kilometer and a total population of at least 10,000.

It’s likely a first-of-its-kind look at how Japan will transform in the long term through the lens of its cities. Mori, a 56-year-old professor at Kyoto University’s Institute of Economic Research, says many developed countries are expected to face aging and declining populations, a trend particularly pronounced in Asian nations where immigration is not a major contributor to population growth.

In his paper, Mori said that in 2020, Japan had 83 cities with at least 100,000 inhabitants and 21 cities with at least 500,000 inhabitants. By 2120, based on a medium-fertility scenario, the number of cities with at least 100,000 and 500,000 inhabitants will fall to 49 and 11, respectively, and will be more widely dispersed. This compares to 42 and 6 in the pessimistic, low-fertility scenario.

In short, half of Japan’s cities could face eradication over the next century.

Fukuoka’s moment

The world is currently undergoing the largest wave of urban growth in history, according to the United Nations, with more than half of the world’s population now living in towns and cities.

Japan is at the forefront of the phenomenon: 80% of its total population live in cities, which, according to Mori, are defined as metropolitan regions — and which account for only 6% of the country’s entire land mass. This influx of people into urban areas is expected to continue, Mori says, with approximately 90% of the population living in cities 100 years from now.

Besides Tokyo, the only city projected to see a significant increase in its share of the population — not to be confused with net population growth — is Fukuoka, Japan’s fourth-largest metropolitan region.

“Fukuoka has the advantage of being outside the influence of Tokyo’s urban agglomeration,” Mori says, unlike the second- and third-largest metropolitan areas, Osaka and Nagoya (Mori groups Yokohama in with the capital’s urban sprawl), which lie between Tokyo and Fukuoka. Located on the northern shore of Japan’s southern Kyushu island, Fukuoka also has good access to neighboring South Korea and China, as well as the advantage of being the final stop of the Sanyo Shinkansen line.

According to Mori’s study, Fukuoka’s population share will increase by 61% between 2020 and 2120. Cities in aging eastern regions will decline more rapidly, however, causing the center of gravity of population distribution to shift toward western Japan.

Osaka, broadly including the southern portion of Kyoto City and the vicinity of Kobe, will remain the second-largest metropolitan area but will be in a state of gradual decline. It’s the only one among the top five, in fact, that has experienced an ebb in population since 2000, a result of the introduction of the Nozomi bullet train service in 1992 that significantly reduced travel time between Tokyo and Osaka. The city essentially became too close to the capital to maintain its population size, Mori says, a trend that will accelerate when the Chuo Shinkansen maglev line eventually opens.

Nagoya’s metropolitan region, in the meantime, could cling onto its No. 3 status thanks to it being a hub for major manufacturers, although its population will see a steep decline to 5.29 million in 2070 and then to 3.06 million in 2120 — a fall of 58% between 2020 and 2120.

According to Mori’s simulation, the disappearance of cities is concentrated in areas that are off the eastern sea route of Tokaido that covers Mie to Ibaraki prefectures and the Sanyodo running by the Seto Inland Sea from Hyogo to Yamaguchi prefectures. In many areas off the shinkansen network and the Tokaido and Sanyo highways, cities of 100,000 will almost completely vanish.

To the east of Tokyo, especially up north in the Tohoku region, cities will be eliminated even along shinkansen lines, leaving Sendai, the capital of Miyagi Prefecture, as the only major city that will maintain its growth trend. And even that could be jeopardized if the population falls to the point where it can no longer support the Tohoku Shinkansen line connecting Tokyo to Aomori, the northernmost prefecture on the main island of Honshu.

“The decline of Tohoku is largely due to the aging of the population,” Mori says. In western Japan, he adds, there are a fair number of people living in mountainous areas, whereas in Tohoku’s harsher climate, there are far fewer.

“Once the population drain starts, it will be fast.”

Flattening cities

Despite being one of the world’s most earthquake-prone nations, one whose population peaked well over a decade ago, developers continue to build massive residential highrises in the country’s urban centers — particularly Tokyo.

There’s an obvious economic benefit. Land prices are rising in the capital, the only region that has seen its population grow while the rest of the country shrinks. As of the end of March, there were 321 residential buildings more than 20 stories high being constructed or planned for completion after 2024, according to Real Estate Economic Institute Co. That translates into 111,645 new housing units, of which 49.2% will be placed in the 130 buildings planned within Tokyo’s 23 wards.

But that trend won’t last, Mori speculates. “Decreasing transportation and communication costs thanks to technologies like autonomous driving and better telecommunications will make it unnecessary to live as densely as before in cities, and there will be no need for tower mansions in urban centers,” he says.

According to his simulation based on a pessimistic scenario, the total price of land will decrease by 30% between 2020 and 2120, while that of cities will fall by 44%. The flattening of cities results in a relatively greater depreciation of land prices in larger centers — specifically, the total price of land in the three largest metropolitan regions of Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya is estimated to decrease by 38%.

Meanwhile, the service industry will be skewed toward urban areas, Mori says. “Entertainment will be substituted with streaming and similar services, and giant shopping malls will no longer be in demand,” he says. “Most things will be handled by mail order. As virtual reality advances, people will be able to try on clothes (in the metaverse) and physical stores will disappear and be limited to large cities.”

The question, then, is what will happen to the rest of the country. Contrary to the popular image of Japan as a massive concrete jungle, two-thirds of the nation’s total area is forested. In recent years, a lack of hunters and a proliferation of abandoned farmland and deserted communities have seen wild animals such as deer, wild boar and even bears encroaching deeper into urban areas.

While there’s no clear-cut answer, Mori says the country should strive to take advantage of its natural resources. “Technology could be used to create a structure where even a small number of people can make money in primary industries such as agriculture, forestry and fishing,” he says.

For that to happen, however, each region will need a city that will serve as a hub for supporting primary industries in distribution and other areas. Since maintaining all existing cities won’t be possible, it will be necessary to select and concentrate on which cities to sustain as these bases and where to invest in infrastructure.

While Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has vowed to take “unprecedented” steps to reverse the declining birthrate — including measures to expand child benefits and child care leave allowances — the latest statistics point to a depopulated future. Last year, the number of babies born hit a record low for the eighth straight year at 758,631 while the number of deaths reached a record 1,590,503, up for the third straight year.

Mori, a father of three, says Japan needs to prioritize policies supporting children in order to make raising kids more affordable. And the children living today, he says, would benefit from thinking about the questions raised in his study, one reason he runs a column on his website that unpacks his simulation in easy-to-understand words and concepts.

“I want kids to think for themselves,” he says, “and consider whether what the adults are doing is correct.”

 

 

 

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