JAPAN has overtaken Italy to become the world’s most elderly nation, fuelling concern over the effects of a rapidly aging population on the world’s second-largest economy.

Census results released yesterday have outdone even the most pessimistic projections. Having spent their lives on a healthy diet of fish, green-tea and rice, Japan’s increasingly long-lived ranks of over-65s now constitute a record 21 per cent of the population — an army of 26.82 million pensioners in a country where the birth-rate continues to sink well below replacement levels.

A record 25,606 people are over 100 years old, a segment of the population that has been expanding for 35 years. One in every 5,000 Japanese is now a centenarian.

With the ratio of youngsters under 15 also plunging to a world record low of 13.6 per cent, the only slightly good news is that Japan’s silver-haired generations can perhaps enjoy their retirement in peace.

What Japan can no longer ignore is that it is in a full-blown demographic crisis and running desperately short of solutions. The government is painfully aware that there is worse to come. The proportion of over 65s has risen to its record high even before the baby-boomers — the largest generation ever born in Japan — have hit retirement age. Those born in the bumper fertility years of 1947-49 will be reaching 60 from next year, dramatically swelling Japan’s overall number of pensioners.

The figures, released by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications yesterday, also told a story of mass migration from the countryside to the big cities and suburbs. In rural prefectures such as Akita and Shimane, young people have fled south to Tokyo leaving around 28 per cent of the local population aged over 65.

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