Figure 5. Trends in Major Age Compositions in Percentage of the Total Population (Median Variant)
of ageing in Japan will be rapid and, by the year 2025, Japan's population aged 65 and over will be 25.8 percent. Since the recent United Nations projections as assessed in 1992 do not reveal any country with equivalently high ageing indicators, Japan would probably be the country which is most aged in the world in the twenty-first century. In the first decades the mean age will continue to rise and will pass the mark of 40 years.
Again, according to the medium variant projections of the Institute of Population Problems, the proportion of the aged will reach 28.4 percent around the middle of the 21st century. If we look into the low variant projections which assume a farther decline in fertility and an eventual stabilization at 1.45 in terms of total fertility rate in the future, the proportion of the aged may rise even to the level 33.3 percent, that is to say, just an one-third of the total population would become the aged. Of course, there are some analytic projections for China on the assumption that their one-child policy would be maintained in the next century. According to such projections by Banister, the proportion of the aged in China currently
