Oz Eigo    English Study, Travel & World Culture

Solving Japan’s age-old problem

Japan is ageing faster than any other nation. By the end of this decade, there will be three pensioners for every child under 15 and before long, one in six people will be over 80. Its population will soon be falling by nearly a million people every year and doomsters predict that, some time in the next century, the last Japanese person will die.

Other countries are encouraging immigration to solve their demographic woes. But not Japan, which is instead developing an extraordinary array of hi-tech products and services. Much of it looks as fanciful as a 1970s edition of BBC1′s Tomorrow’s World. But it’s a fact that the elderly in Japan control half the country’s wealth, and a new “old” economy – dominated by pharmaceuticals, nursing care and medical equipment – is being fashioned around them. What they do now is perhaps a glimpse of what consumer society may look like in Britain when our baby boomers hit their 70s and 80s.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2010/mar/20/japan-ageing-population-technology

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Tags: Japan