Sometime later this month, Japan will release the first estimate of births and deaths in 2020 — an annual gift from the health ministry that arrives around December 25 with all the seasonal joy of a broken boiler.
For the past 13 years, this release has delivered evidence of Japan’s shrinking indigenous population and its darkening demographic shadow via a series of bleak milestones. These seem all the starker for their stubborn resistance to remedy and for the cautionary road map they provide the outside world.
By 2008 — one year after the great inflection from growth to decline — deaths in Japan outnumbered births by just over 50,000. By 2019, that imbalance had increased tenfold to more than half a million. In 2016, the population decreased at an average rate of 1,000 people per day. Based on monthly numbers, 2020 is on trajectory for a possible shrinkage rate equivalent to 1,500 per day, or one person per minute.