Will the Japanese hear Elon Musk’s call for a start? “At the risk of stating the obvious, unless something allows more births than deaths, Japan will disappear. And it would be a great loss to the world,” the Tesla and SpaceX founder tweeted last Monday. The most influential business leader on the planet reacted to the announcement of another calamitous year for the demography of the Archipelago. In 2021, the world’s third largest economy saw its population shrink by 644,000 souls, to 125.5 million people. A new march in the collapse of the country, started in 2008, the year of its population peak.
Japan has never solved the problem of its declining birth rate. The number of under-fifteens has been falling since 1982; their share of the population, which has been falling since 1974, now stands at 11.7%. Everywhere, the signs of this depopulation appear. On the site of the IPSS, the local demographic institute, the list of prefectures by age category is dismal like that of the guests of a funeral ceremony. The prefecture of Tottori (southern Japan), for example, has only 22,000 children (0-4 years old). This desertification is not limited to the countryside. Even around Omotesando, the Champs-Elysées in Tokyo, a plethora of surrounding houses are vacant despite the value of real estate in this part of the capital. “The owners of these homes have no heirs. The neighborhood is withering away,” laments Seiichi Matsui, former president of the neighborhood merchants’ association.
Asia-wide demographic breakdown
But most heartbreaking is the reaction to Elon Musk’s Japan-loving tweet. In government, we play dead. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, like his predecessors, did not make demography, yet a vital subject, one of the themes of his administration. His spokesperson did not comment on Elon Musk’s spade. The opposition does not blame him. Worse: analysts in Japan have rather mocked the founder of Tesla for meddling in a subject he does not master. “I cannot conceive how bored a man whose fortune exceeds 200 billion dollars is to express such an opinion”, for example commented Tobias Harris, author of a biography of ex-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe . Others, relativists, note that the demographic breakdown extends to all of 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, does not is no more lazy (1.7 children per woman). Another camp, optimists, note that Japan is opening its doors ever wider to immigration, which would partly fill its demographic deficit.
But this is not a solution either: the Archipelago refuses any immigration of settlement, and even its professional attractiveness declines compared to similar economies. ”Japan’s problem is not that it is xenophobic or closed to immigrants, as some claim, but rather that it does not have the means to welcome them. The average salary in Korea exceeded that of Japan by 9%. The OECD average is 28% higher than Japan’s,” observes CLSA strategist Nicholas Smith in a recent note. The foreign population has, moreover, decreased in 2021. Conquer Mars or electrify the global car fleet, Elon Musk can do it; change Japan, it will be more difficult.