After this short postwar baby boom, fertility declined sharply in Japan.During the 1947-1957 period, the total fertility rate (TFR) fell by more than half, from 4.54 to 2.04 children per woman. There were only minor fluctuations around the replacement level until the first oil crisis in 1973.Thereafter, the TFR started to fall again and reached 1.43 in 1995.
In addition, age-specific mortality rates declined during the last 50 years. Over the period 1947 to 1965, life expectancy at birth rose from 50.1 to 67.7 years for men and from 54.0 to 72.9 years for women. In 1995,life expectancy was 76.4 for men and 82.8 for women; both of these levels are currently the highest in the world.
As a result, Japan's population aging process is unprecedentedly rapid,and is expected to accelerate towards the early part of the next century (Ogawa, 1993). Although Japan's current level of population aging is not yet as advanced as in many of the Western industrialized nations, within the next few decades it is likely to be even higher than the current levels of those countries (Ogawa, 1993). Furthermore, the Japanese societal structure and family organization are substantially different from those of other developed nations (Morgan and Hirosima, 1983; Ogawa and Retherford,1993b). For these reasons, Japan's process of adjustment to her age structural shifts is likely to encounter a wide range of problems, both serious and unique, in allocating support resources for a rapidly growing number of the elderly population.
In this paper, we will discuss a variety of likely consequences of Japan's rapid population aging upon the socioeconomic system in the 1990s and beyond. The next section will provide a brief description of the labor market and the social security system in Japan. Section 2 will discuss, by heavily drawing upon a macroeconomic-demographic simulation model, the process of aging of the Japanese population likely to occur over the next few decades,highlighting its uniqueness in comparison with that for other developed nations. In Section 3, the impact of Japan's future population aging processes upon the socioeconomic system will be assessed, by referring to some of the projected results produced from the macroeconomic-demographic simulation model. In the final section of this paper, we will consider some policy options and their feasibility.
