For 19-year-old Keiichi Yasunaga, the year 2050 lies somewhere beyond the visible horizon — more a hazy idea than a point in time. It’s the era of his parents’ retirement, his own middle age, a period his generation tends to put out of mind, something to be dealt with later.
Yet, as the first quarter of the 21st century draws to a close, demographic shifts already underway are beginning to define the next 25 years. By midcentury, today’s teenagers will inherit a country transformed: a Japan with millions fewer people, an unprecedented share of older residents and a generational balance tilted in ways no society has experienced before.
“It’s hard for me to imagine what it will be like by 2050,” says Yasunaga, a senior in high school who plans to enroll at Tokyo’s Waseda University next spring. “I think AI will be at the center of our daily lives. I also think pensions will eventually disappear, and the retirement age will keep getting pushed back — to 80, or maybe even 90 in the worst case.”
Predicting the future is no easy task. Geopolitical upheavals, technological shifts, climate change and policy choices can upend even the most careful forecast. Population projections, however, stand out as an exception, offering some of the clearest glimpses of what lies ahead.
The National Institute of Population and Social Security Research estimates that Japan’s population will fall to roughly 100 million by 2050, more than 20 million fewer than today. The share of residents aged 65 and over, which stood at 29.4% as of September, is expected to reach 37.1% by then.
As society grays, the dependency ratio — the number of children and older adults supported by every 100 people of working age — is projected to rise from 68.0 to 89.0, meaning each working-age person is effectively supporting one dependent. That demographic transformation will ripple through nearly every corner of national life.
Rural communities will shrink and strain to maintain basic services. Families will change shape as single-person elderly households — especially among women — become far more common. A tightening labor force will push industries toward automation, even as the social care sector faces a staggering shortage of workers. And as the population skews older, demand will shift sharply toward medical care and senior services, while youth-oriented markets contract.
The challenges are immense, but Japan’s response will offer lessons for every aging society navigating a similar future.
“It’s very hard to know what the global landscape will look like 25 years from now,” says Yasunaga, who hopes to join Japan’s Foreign Ministry after graduating university and pursue a career as a diplomat.
“AI will likely play a key role in supporting government and infrastructure,” he adds. “But since it cannot replace physical labor, Japan will need to figure out how to make up for the shortfall.”
Akita: Vision of the future
After graduating from Akita International University, Daiki Nakada chose not to pursue a career in Tokyo. Instead, he joined a tourism-related startup in Semboku, a city in the northern prefecture of Akita, putting his English skills to use.
“Akita is often described as a front-line case of Japan’s aging and depopulation challenge,” says Nakada, 24, who hails from Okinawa. “But it also has a unique culture and charm, and I wanted to see what I could do here to help revive the local economy.”
Akita’s population stood at roughly 878,000 as of Nov. 1, down 1.93% from a year earlier — the steepest decline of any prefecture in the nation. The share of residents 65 and older exceeds 40%, making it the only prefecture to cross that threshold. By 2050, Akita’s population is projected to fall to around 560,000, little more than 60% of its current size.
In addition to offering customized tours and farmstays through an outfit called Inaka Travel Akita, Nakada organizes a fully funded, one-year overseas study-abroad program for high school students in the prefecture. His own startup, Kakunodate Alliance, which he launched this year, has also taken over operations of a bar near Kakunodate Station, aiming to give visitors a reason to linger in town.
“I think we have a clear-eyed understanding of both the strengths and the challenges of Akita, and we’re good at bringing in younger people who share the same values,” Nakada says.
By 2050, the young entrepreneur will be around 50 years old. “When I think about where I want to be then, I imagine my base will still be in Akita,” he says. “Akita is the prefecture that’s declining faster than anywhere else in Japan, which means it’s also the first place where you can see the country’s social challenges play out.”
Empty homes, aging neighbors
Public and private actors alike have been raising awareness of the “2050 problem,” a broad set of social challenges stemming from low birthrates, population aging and labor shortages.
Over the past year, the Dai-ichi Life Research Institute has also turned its attention to the issue, examining how demographic decline could reshape the country. Takuya Hoshino, a chief economist at the think tank, points to several major shifts likely to define Japan’s landscape as it looks toward 2050. Among the most pressing topics, unsurprisingly, is rural depopulation.
“Population concentration, especially in Tokyo, has been a long-standing trend, with people continuing to flow into urban areas,” Hoshino says. “As a result, rural regions struggle to attract young people, which in turn makes it harder for families to form and children to be born. That dynamic is turning into a downward spiral, accelerating depopulation in the countryside.”
Many municipalities, Hoshino says, will face an increasingly stark reality. Keeping basic public services running will grow more difficult. Closures of hospitals, care facilities and schools could erode quality of life, while labor shortages and aging staff threaten local governance itself. Community ties may fray, infrastructure may deteriorate and disaster readiness could suffer.
Municipal mergers and compact-city strategies are likely to become unavoidable, but rising costs and resistance to relocation underscore how difficult managing decline will be.
“At the same time, cities are not immune to the impact. Urban areas are also seeing an increase in older residents, including seniors who move to cities for convenience,” Hoshino says.
Government projections show a sharp rise in elderly single-person households, increasing from 13.2% of all households in 2020 to 20.6% by 2050. Women are expected to account for about 60% of these units, with the number of older women living alone nearly matching the number of elderly couple-only homes, both at just over 6.3 million.
“Debates over social security tend to focus on money — on worsening public finances and the need to raise premiums,” Hoshino says. “But even now, the more immediate problem is a shortage of people and an inability to maintain adequate service capacity.”
While the working-age population has been falling since the mid-1990s, labor force participation has so far been propped up by rising employment among women and older adults. That buffer, however, is nearing its limits, Hoshino says. The years ahead are likely to bring intensifying labor shortages and accelerating shifts toward automation, productivity gains and, potentially, greater reliance on non-Japanese workers — developments that will introduce their own institutional and social challenges.
Vanishing cradles
On Jan. 12, 2026, 20-year-old Saya Tamaki will be among the many young people marking Coming of Age Day, the national holiday on the second Monday of January celebrating the transition into adulthood — even though Japan legally lowered the age of adulthood to 18 in 2022.
After peaking at 2.46 million in 1970 during the first postwar baby boom, the number of young people reaching adulthood — and with them Japan’s future workforce — briefly rebounded to 2.07 million in 1994 before resuming a steady decline, hitting record lows in recent years at a little over 1 million people.
Tamaki, a second-year student at Tokyo’s Meiji University studying sociology, focuses her research on gender and LGBTQ issues. She identifies as aromantic asexual and has spent time thinking about the role women play in society, as well as about childbirth.
“There’s a common argument that as more women enter the workforce, more choose not to have children and instead focus on their careers,” Tamaki says. “But I think framing women’s workforce participation as a single, nationwide trend behind the phenomenon is an overgeneralization.”
A survey by the health ministry found that around 319,000 babies were born in the first half of 2025, more than 10,000 fewer than a year earlier — a pace that could put the total for the year at a record low. Japan's total fertility rate — the average number of children a woman is likely to have over her childbearing years — fell in 2024 for the ninth consecutive year, declining to 1.15 from 1.2 the year before.
Rising living costs, economic uncertainty and the high expense of fertility treatment are often cited as reasons having children can feel risky or out of reach in Japan. While many explanations are offered for falling birthrates, there is broad agreement on several underlying factors: dramatic reductions in infant mortality due to advances in medicine; economic development that has reduced child labor and shifted expectations toward education rather than household work; and women’s greater participation in society, which has eased social pressure to give birth.
Viewed from a global perspective, population decline is the byproduct of human success — and once it begins, demographers say, it is largely irreversible.
Tamaki, who heads a student organization called Empower Meiji, argues that rather than the government simply urging people to “have more children” — including those who do not want them — support should be directed toward those who do.
“That could mean financial assistance,” she says, “or, in the case of LGBTQ couples who want children, expanding options by improving the safety and accessibility of assisted reproductive technologies.”
“I hope for a society where people who want to have children are better able to do so.”
Redefining what ‘old’ means
Addressing her ministers during the first meeting of the Population Strategy Headquarters on Nov. 18, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said that “based on the recognition that Japan’s greatest challenge is population decline, the aim is to build a society in which everyone — including young people and women — can continue to live in the communities they themselves choose.”
If Japan’s birthrate continues on its current trajectory, the consequences could be extreme, experts warn. Projections by Hiroshi Yoshida, a professor at Tohoku University’s Research Center for Aged Economy and Society, suggest that by Jan. 5, 2720, the country would have just one child age 14 or younger.
“There are many debates around population decline, but the conversation inevitably turns to getting women to have more children,” says Shinichiro Umeya, a fellow at the Nomura Research Institute’s Center for Strategic Management and Innovation.
“Framing it as something women must do — that unless women act, society is in trouble — risks placing the burden on them,” he says. “We believe individual choices cannot and should not be coerced.”
There is also little clarity, Umeya adds, about what the plan is if births do not increase. Declining birthrates are part of a broad, global trend; Japan is simply 20 to 30 years ahead of the rest of the world. Countries often cited as “success stories” in raising birthrates, Umeya notes, largely reflect temporary increases driven by immigration rather than genuine reversals, meaning there are effectively no clear examples of sustained improvement.
The result is growing strain on infrastructure. As populations shrink, the balance between urban and rural areas shifts sharply. Tomoya Mori, a professor at Kyoto University, has simulated that by 2120, half of Japan’s cities could disappear, as the population — in a worst-case scenario — plunges to less than a third of its current size.
One possible way to ease the socioeconomic burden of demographic decline, then, would be to extend the working age of the population.
In many countries, including Japan, people 65 and older are commonly classified as “elderly,” a standard often traced back to a 1956 United Nations report, when average life expectancy in Japan was around 65. Since then, life expectancy has risen to more than 80 and health in later life has improved. Japanese academic societies have argued that there is no longer a clear medical or biological basis for defining old age at 65, calling the continued use of that benchmark increasingly outdated.
Taking this into account, Umeya and his team recalculated the dependency ratio by extending the definition of the working-age population from 15 to 64 to 15 to 69. Under this revised measure, the ratio falls to 67.8 in 2050 — virtually unchanged from the 68.0 level seen in 2020.
“In other words, if the working-age population could effectively be extended by five years, the dependency burden in 2050 would be roughly on par with that of today,” Umeya says.
Major life events — marriage, childbirth, retirement — would naturally have to shift later as well, he adds. To make such a change feasible, Japan would need to urgently rethink how pensions for those 65 and older are structured, while also developing technologies and systems that can support age-related declines in physical and cognitive ability.
“Infrastructure is another challenge,” Umeya continues. “Existing systems may remain viable in major cities such as Tokyo and Fukuoka, but elsewhere difficult choices will be unavoidable: consolidation and prioritization, and in some cases withdrawing services from areas where few people remain.”
Technology will be key to managing this transition, from water recycling systems to autonomous vehicles. Different regions will require different approaches.
“Ultimately, however, the most important factor is local initiative,” Umeya says. “While public sentiment may favor further concentration in major cities, rural communities will bear the costs. Recognizing that this outcome is possible, regions need to act proactively and lead their own responses rather than waiting to be left behind.”
The only way is forward
Despite the many uncertainties that lie ahead, today’s young adults show little sign of retreating from the future.
Ahead of this year’s Coming of Age Day, advertising giant Hakuhodo surveyed 800 men and women ages 18 to 89 on what happiness means to new adults in an era of 100-year lifespans. Only about 30% of respondents overall said they wanted to live to 100. Among newly minted adults, however, more than half did.
What set them apart was not optimism about the systems awaiting them, but an attitude toward life itself: a desire to keep moving forward, to try “many different things” and to continue “finding enjoyment over a long life.”
Hizuki Tanaka, a 20-year-old from Sado Island in Niigata Prefecture, studies illustration and art while supporting himself by working at bars and restaurants in Tokyo. Looking ahead to 2050, he says he worries that design, creativity and craftsmanship made by humans could be pushed to the margins by AI.
“I really hope that even in 2050, there will still be a place for people who create wonderful things by hand — and that they’ll be able to work with energy and pride,” he says.
For a generation raised amid a demographic crisis yet living overall healthier lifestyles, longevity is no longer an anomaly but increasingly a given — something to be navigated by making the right choices. The future they face is not guaranteed to be comfortable or secure. But then again, it never has been.
“I want to be a 45-year-old who faces things honestly and kindly,” says Tanaka, who turns 21 in January. “Someone who values human connections and engages with the world in a straightforward, sincere way.”
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