Demographics
The age pyramid of the Japanese population is that of an elderly country, even if the average age in Tōkyō is slightly lower thanin the rest of the country. The country has one of the highest life expectancies in the world (87.2 years for women and 81.5 years for men). What's more, a falling birth rate is leading to a shrinking population. The tipping point came in 2005. For the first time since 1899, Japan's population was down on the previous year. In 2024, over 29% of the population will be over 65, a world record. Japan has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, with 1.26 children per woman and around 6.1 births per year per 1,000 inhabitants. Today, the Land of the Rising Sun is one of the world's oldest countries, along with Italy and Germany. City centers are inhabited by a younger, often single, population, while families and the elderly are found on the urban periphery. Generally speaking, the Japanese countryside is undergoing significant aging, with a rural exodus of young people to the cities (for work). In Tōhoku, this phenomenon is particularly visible: some rural communities in Akita and Yamagata now have over 30% senior citizens. Many departments are now trying to revitalize the birth rate by offering financial assistance to families wishing to have a third child.
Birth
Japanese women have an average of 1.26 children, compared with 1.62 in France. This rate does not allow for the renewal of generations. Without significant immigration over the next few years, Japan's population will continue to decline. For several years now, the government has been encouraging couples to have children, by offering parents a bonus. Some prefectures, such as Fukushima and Iwate, also offer incentives to return to the countryside, in the form of subsidized housing or support for business start-ups.
Composition
Japan's population is one of the most homogeneous in the world. According to official sources, 3,768,977 foreigners were resident in Japan at the end of 2024, representing around 3% of the population. This compares with around 10% of the population of industrialized countries. Japan has recorded two waves of immigration in its history: the first from China and Korea during the colonial period, and the second from Latin America, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand in the 1980s. Today, Koreans make up Japan's largest foreign community. And it's not so easy to become Japanese. The law of the land does not necessarily prevail. Today, and since the 1990s, a policy of "selective" immigration has been in place. The authorities have never concealed their intention to maintain an ethnically and culturally homogeneous nation. And to maintain the current share of its working population in the overall population, they have no choice but to attract foreigners. In recent years, measures have been stepped up to enable certain professional profiles (health, construction, catering) to stay longer, but quotas remain limited.
Language
In Japan, over 120 million people speak... Japanese. The remaining millions are immigrants who are trying to get to grips with the language, with varying degrees of success. Apart from Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and English are the languages most commonly heard, even if they remain marginal. A few dialects are spoken by people, mainly from other parts of the Archipelago. Japanese developed, among other things, on and around the dialects of the Kansai region (Kyōto, the former capital). From the 17th century onwards, it was built around the main dialect of the Kantō region, and thus the one spoken in Tōkyō. The growing political influence of Edo allowed this dialect to influence Japanese as it is spoken today. To find all the signs needed to write Japanese, you need to know three systems: kanji (characters borrowed from Chinese), katakana and hiragana. The last two are syllabic alphabets. Japanese is traditionally written from top to bottom and from right to left, with no spaces between words. This type of formatting is called tategaki. Japanese writing is thought to date back to 400 B.C. Influenced by Chinese characters, it was not completed until the 8th century, then the 19th century, with the creation of the katakana by Kibi-no-mabi, and the hiragana invented by the Buddhist saint Kōbō-daishi.
