Will the Japanese listen to Elon Musk’s call to start? “At the risk of stating the obvious, if something prevents more births than deaths, Japan will disappear. And it would be a great loss for the whole world,” the founder of Tesla and SpaceX tweeted last Monday. The most powerful business leader on the planet reacted to the announcement of another disastrous year for the demographics of the Archipelago. In 2021, the population of the world’s third largest economy decreased by 644,000 souls to 125.5 million people. A new march of the collapse of the country began in 2008, the year of the peak of its population.
Japan has not solved the problem of declining birth rates. Since 1982, the number of persons under fifteen has been declining; their share in the population, which has been declining since 1974, now stands at 11.7%. There are signs of this depopulation everywhere. On the website of the local IPSS Demographic Institute, the list of prefectures by age category is dull, like those of funeral guests. For example, in Tottori Prefecture (southern Japan) there are only 22,000 children (0-4 years old). This desertification is not limited to the countryside. Even around Omotesando, the Champs Elysees in Tokyo, many nearby houses are empty, despite the value of real estate in this part of the capital. “The owners of these houses have no heirs. The area is fading,” lamented Seiichi Matsui, former president of the local merchants association.
Demographic breakdown across Asia
But most of all, the heartbreaking reaction to Elon Musk’s tweet about Japan. In government, we play dead. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, like his predecessors, has not made demographics, though a vital topic, one of the themes of his administration. His spokesman did not comment on Elon Musk’s picket. The opposition does not blame him. Worse, Japanese analysts are ridiculing the Tesla founder for tampering with an item he doesn’t own. “I can’t imagine how boring it would be for someone with a net worth of more than $200 billion to voice such an opinion,” commented Tobias Harris, author of a biography of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, for example. Others, relativists, point out that the demographic decline is spreading throughout Asia. South Korea has a lower birth rate (0.8 children per woman in 2020) than Japan (1.3), and China, despite abandoning its “one-child policy” in 2016, is not being lazy (1, 7 children per woman). The other camp, the optimists, note that Japan is increasingly opening its doors to immigration, which will partly make up for its demographic deficit.
But this is not a solution: the Archipelago refuses any immigration of the settlement, and even its professional attractiveness falls in comparison with similar economies. “Japan’s problem is not that it is xenophobic or closed to immigrants, as some claim, but that it does not have the means to accept them. The average salary in Korea was 9% higher than in Japan. The OECD average is 28% higher than Japan’s,” said CLSA strategist Nicholas Smith in a recent note. In addition, the foreign population has declined in 2021. Conquering Mars or electrifying the world’s car fleet is within the power of Elon Musk; change Japan, it will be more difficult.