Why Japan is the perfect place to turn 50

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So. A big, round-numbered, and threatening birthday is coming up in a few weeks.Not to give too much away, but my birth month, Momoe Yamaguchi Fuyu no Iro electrified the tables, The horror of Mechagodzilla was about to hit theaters, and Okinawa was busy making last-minute preparations for Expo ’75.

There are different ways to put this grim milestone into context.I’m a year younger than Hello Kitty, a decade younger than her Shinkansen bullet train and 100,000 years younger than Mt.Fuji.I guess they’re still going strong, though no one’s worried about the high cholesterol, the languor of the leisure pace, or the click above the mile of lost opportunity.

But then I remember more happily that this birthday will take place in creaky, aging Japan; a country where gray is the new black, lambago is the new Lambada, and 50 isn’t just the new 20, it’s more or less middle age.

Japan’s demographics at both ends of the spectrum place it at the forefront of both care home citizenship and the erosion of youth. the giant, 8 million baby boomer generation has simply moved from the “elderly” category to the “progressive” category. elderly.” By 2030, the government predicts, more than 8 million Japanese will be in some kind of caregiver role, 40 percent of those in real work.

At a time when my generation needs one, the billions of taxpayer yen that have gone into creating caregiving robots could finally create a half-decent nurse-o-tron

It is impossible to miss. Starting this year, one in five Japanese will be over 75, and almost 30 percent of the population will be over 65. Demographics, some economists warn, are set to wreak more havoc on Japan than the collapse of the 1980s asset bubble never has there been one so old in this proportion to the rest of the population, and with so many open questions as to how it will cope.No population so peaceful, so healthy, so good fed has never shrunk at such a rate.Japan’s numbers are dire economically, socially and existentially, but they don’t make a 50-year-old man feel half as young.

And aside from being another member of the middle-aged group, in theory all I have to do to deal with the creeping downsides of age is stay in Japan and hope the statistics take care of the practical side.

I, for example, should become healthier on paper. In 2023, after a three-year hiatus caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, Japan resumed its decades-long pattern of advancing life expectancy. Japanese women lead the world in life expectancy at 87.14 years, but according to health ministry charts, a man my age can expect to live another 32.6 years.

Averages suggest I’ll be rolling in it, too.Crossing the Japanese mid-century mark, you enter the large “over 50” segment of society, which statistically accumulates nearly 66 percent of the country’s $7 trillion in money and deposits the very old estates leaving only the quite old.

And more generally, being 50 brings you a disproportionate amount of political weight in Japan.Even in the already all-silver democracy, there are more 50-year-olds than any other group, and the country has provided a master class in matching fiscal size with electoral math. : Dotage is votage.

In Japan, people over 50 are the last generation to be net beneficiaries of government spending over their lifetime (in terms of education, healthcare, etc.) All young people are in the red and will remain so until the heat death of the universe. And the fringe benefits are nice, too.At a time when my generation needs one, the billions of taxpayer yen that have gone into creating caregiving robots could finally create a half-decent one. nurse-o-tron: Maybe.

All of this, except for the increase in life expectancy, is obviously a pretty sad thing. Promoting a healthy, happy age is an obvious boon. , which has accrued to the younger generations, which has quietly supported it and now seems utterly, alarmingly intolerable.

And that’s why, for the wrong reasons, Japan is the perfect place to turn 50. As a nation, it’s a world pioneer in not just being old, but in the mass-comforting delusion that it can get away with it we are all technically getting younger.

Leo Lewis is the FT’s Tokyo bureau chief

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