Age ain't nothing but a number

How is a "hyper-aged" country like Japan also a leader in youth culture?

Doraemon 2050?

Last week, Japan made headlines when its birthrate hit another all-time low. The coverage, as usual, focused on the gloom. Population crisis! Alarm bells! And those low birth rates are correlated to a related phenomenon of super-aged societies: a “silver tsunami” where adult diapers outsell baby diapers. Currently more than 30% of Japan’s population is over 65. If the trend continues, by 2050 nearly half of Japanese will be elderly.

To hear the experts tell it, a super-aged society should be a recipe for economic stagnation and cultural irrelevance. Yet Japan isn’t fading away. Its fantasies in the form of games, cartoons, and comic books grow in popularity year by year, and tourists are swarming its cities to the point municipalities are trying to rein them in with fines and the blocking off of iconic views.

How is it that a super-aged society has somehow emerged as a global leader in youth culture? Does Japan hint that it is possible for an ageing society to avoid catastrophe -- even age gracefully? Nobody is asking these questions, because they undercut the doomsday narratives that drive engagement. And so Japan remains an enigma, its demographic “time bomb” (as critics would have it) at odds with its national charisma.

Or is it?

Let’s take a look at things from a different perspective: that of pop-cultural production. The Japan Animation Creators Association publishes a survey of the industry every year. As of 2023, the average age of an anime industry employee was 38.8. But when you get to the higher echelons of veteran craftspeople, things change. The average scenario writer is 48. The average storyboarder is 51. And the average director is 61 years old – a relative whippersnapper, compared to a certain gent who just won his second Oscar at age 83.

I couldn’t find similarly granular breakdowns for the game industry, but the average Nintendo employee is 39.9, a year older than the average animator, so I suspect the director/producer corps resembles that of the anime industry, too. The director of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, for instance, is 51. Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto was 70 when he co-produced the hugely profitable The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Anime and games appeal to young folks – but they aren’t necessarily being made by them. And fans love them for it! There’s no secret about any of these mover-and-shaker’s ages. It’s hard to think of another medium as beloved among young people where this is the case. It’s as though young pop-music fans were idolizing sexagenarians instead of twenty year olds.

Japan’s demographic situation is nothing new. The birth rate has been dropping steadily since 1973. The issue is so well known that I recall shusseiritsu no teika, “a drop in birth rates,” popping up as a vocabulary term in my Japanese class in the early 90s. And as you can see from the above stats, age doesn’t seem to be any hindrance to producing cool stuff. So why do leaders fret over birth rates and older populations?

Speaking purely from an economic standpoint, smaller numbers of young citizens mean smaller labor pools, which causes growth and productivity to drop. Fewer people buy fewer things, meaning prices of goods get more expensive. Tax bases shrink, making it harder to fund new initiatives. And it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain a strong military. These sorts of issues start to manifest when people aged 65 and over represent 20% or more of a population. Japan was the first advanced nation to reach that milestone in 2007. The average Westerner didn’t yet grasp that the exact same thing was inevitably going to happen to their country, so the news coverage was even more apocalyptic back then. Observers dubbed Japan a super-aged, then a hyper-aged, then a “death-laden society.”

So Japan was the canary in the coal mine for advanced societies around the world, demographically speaking. But flipping things around, the trend is also evidence of many good things. Dramatic reductions in infant mortality, access to birth control, and higher levels of education and economic opportunity – all of it translates into people choosing to have less children, or none at all, as they pursue their personal interests and dreams. And access to medical care means the average citizen lives a longer life. Ageing populations aren’t bugs of advanced societies. They’re a feature. Japan just happened to get there a little ahead of the rest of us, as in so many things, from discovering karaoke and emoji to pioneering getting married to cartoon characters. (Yes, it’s a thing in America now too.)

Japan’s rise as a pop-cultural superpower over the second half of the 20th century was fueled by a pair of baby booms. The first, immediately after war’s end, produced some eight million kids who became consumers of manga in the Fifties and televised anime in the Sixties. When these children came of age, they sparked a second, briefer boom from 1971 to 1973, at which point births began dropping steadily, leading to the current demographic predicament.

This might make you wonder: if legions of kids made Japan’s pop culture shine, shouldn’t less kids mean less cool stuff coming out of the country? Yet this hasn’t been the case. Japan is producing more anime and games today than ever before, even during the peaks of its baby booms.

The idea that playthings are only for kids comes out of a distinctly Western way of thinking. The first foreign observers to arrive in the country noted in their journals the number of toy shops they encountered, in cities and countryside, even in sancrosanct places such as temples and shrines. They marveled even more at “full-grown men and able-bodied natives indulging in amusements which the men of the West lay aside with their pinafores,” as a shocked William Elliot Griffis wrote in 1867.

We aren’t shocked by this kind of thing anymore, because “kidults” all over the advanced world are indulging in those same sorts of amusements. Put another way, Japan might be uniquely positioned to produce child-like delights even as a super-aged society, and the other rapidly-ageing societies around the world are uniquely positioned to appreciate them. The tremendous financial success of made-in-Japan anime, games, comics, and other escapes are evidence of that.

And let us not forget another East Asian nation that is facing an even steeper decline in births: South Korea. The minimum needed to sustain a population’s size is 2.1 births per woman. Japan set off the alarm bells last week for hitting 1.2. For comparison, America’s is 1.6, and the EU’s 1.5. But South Korea’s birth rate is 0.72 — the lowest on the planet. The nation is projected to hit the super-aged tipping-point next year, in 2025. Yet Korea is another pop-culture powerhouse, one whose influence rivals Japan’s or even exceeds it in many spheres.

I do not mean to downplay the very real challenges that ageing societies pose for citizens and leaders. Nor am I saying to ignore the experts — the demographics don’t lie, and have very real implications for a nation’s culture, politics, even its security.

But ageing societies are also a fact of life in the developed world. And they are entirely a function of freedom of choice. So perhaps it’s time to start looking at the phenomenon as something to live with, rather than some monster to be conquered. While we’re at it, we might try to find other ways of measuring success and satisfaction beyond the standard indices of marriage, house, kids, retirement.

Economists predicted the end of “Japan, Inc.” after the bubble burst in 1990. They were right in some ways. But they also missed how thoroughly Japan would pivot from a maker of things into a maker of dreams. Japan and other hyper-aged societies are in uncharted waters yet again, and there’s no predicting how things will really play out over the long run.

For the moment, nations like Japan and Korea show that it is possible for a society to age gracefully, even perhaps awesomely. As the saying goes, age is just a number — so we shouldn’t let numbers paint a overly depressing view of the road ahead.