Source: Ministry of Health and Welfare, Heisel 7-nen Jinko Dotal Gaisu (Provisional Vital Statistics Report for the Year 1995) February 1996; Ministry of Health and Welfare, Heisei 6-nen Jinko Dote Tokel (Vital Statistics 1994, Japan), Vol.1, 1996
Why is the speed of population ageing so rapid in Japan? This point will be discussed in detail in the next section, but this is because the speed of fertility decline in the postwar years was so rapid in Japan. Table 4 shows the trends of fertility in Japan. It is remarkable that crude birth rate which was 34.3 per 1000 population in 1947 had been halved to 17.2 in 1957, there after fertility never coming back to the level higher than 20 per 1000. The almost unprecedented rapidity of birth rate decline and the continuity of very low fertility level are the principal causes for presenting Japan as a country of the most rapidly ageing population in the world.
F. Causes of Population Ageing in Japan
What have then been the causes for such a rapid population ageing to take place in the future in Japan? Many people even in the journalism have made their off-the-cuff statement that recent prolongation of life expectancy is the cause for it. Indeed, as represented by Figure 7, the recent Japanese life expectancies for both males and fermales have already surpassed those of European countries such as Iceland and France which had been regarded arnong the highest life expectancy countries in the world.Although the above conventional view of cause of population ageing is true for Japan in the very recent years, but the fact of the matter is more com-
