Immigrants Flood Into Japan At A Record Pace

Japan’s demographic “time-bomb” has been widely documented in recent years: as we discussed most recently in February, as troubling as Japan’s deflationary economic quagmire is, the biggest threat facing Japan has little to do with its balance sheet and everything to do with its demographics, for the simple reason that not only is Japan’s population the oldest it has ever been, as well as the oldest on average in the entire world, but is now also officially shrinking.
Earlier this year, data released by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications showed that in the latest 5 year census, Japan’s population declined last year for the first time in nearly a century. The Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry said the latest census shows that Japan’s population as of Oct. 1, 2015, was 127,110,047 – a decline of 947,305, or 0.7 percent, since the last census conducted in 2010. The number of Japanese dropped to 127.1 million in a national census for 2015, down 0.7 percent compared with five years earlier, and was the first recorded decline since the 5-year census started in 1920. As the Shimbun adds, in the 2015 census, men accounted for 61,829,237 of the population, and women 65,280,810.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Apr 16, 2017.