Celebrating Japan’s Centenarians…

The other day I mentioned in passing that Japan’s aging society is going to be an increasingly important issue for the Japanese health system. Today I’d like to look at this a little more positively. Today the government released details of 40,399 people aged over 100 in Japan this month, which is more than 4,000 more than this time last year. In fact, this figure has been increasingly very rapidly for the last 50 years, and it was just 10 years ago that it passed 10,000. UN projections (which are so reliable) claim that by 2050 there will be more than 1 million centenarians (something inside me wanted to say ‘centurians’…. but this is the correct term…) in Japan.

When figures like this are thrown around, the media love to talk about problems that this will cause, including the fact that the pension system was never designed to support such a large portion of the population for more than 40 years of their lives… But at the same time, this is something to be truly celebrated. Incredibly, living to such an old age is a very new phenomenon. Around the end of the 18th century, people typically lived to around 35-40, which is something that I can’t even comprehend (I would be firmly in my old age by now……)…. And Japanese life expectancy didn’t reach 50 until after WWII. Since then, life expectancy has improved out of sight, with Japanese women now expected to live to around 86, and men 79.

While it is common for us to be bombarded day after day with problems and disasters brewing around us, it is sometimes a good idea to sit back and think about how much better life is today compared to even just 50 years ago. We truly live in the most blessed period of history. While there are plenty of issues to be concerned about, life can’t be all that bad when we have developed the ability to double our lifespan over such a relatively short period of time. Pollution, fast food, and financial woes notwithstanding, people are living better standard, longer lives today than ever before.

The Japanese government is gradually extending the retirement age from 60 to 65 in an attempt to save the pension program from imploding. This is long overdue. I know many people in their 60s and even 70s in Japan who still have the energy, and certainly the wisdom and mental ability, to be extremely productive members of society. The issue of retiring such people is a complicated one, because in order to keep employing older people and also employ young school leavers, the economy will naturally need to grow and develop more job opportunities… But this is something that should be attended to post haste.

I see no reason why 70 year olds shouldn’t, in principal, be at least allowed to work, if not fully encouraged to. The retirement age of 60 is long outdated, harking back to a time before it was common to live to around 80. Indeed, in the 1950s in Japan, the percentage of the population that were 65 or over was just 5%. Today, this is around 20%, and is expected to rise to around 40% by 2055. Thats a massive change in demographics, and yet the pension system has not changed to keep up. This is going to be one of the biggest issues for the new Hatoyama government to tackle, and I hope that they take a comprehensive and long term approach, and not just punt the issue for another decade or so…

References:

Japan’s century club swells to more than 40,000

Living Longer

Aging of Japan

Elderly People in Japan