it's quite an eerie feeling to walk through these streets because you don't see anybody
you don't hear any cars you don't see anything and most of the places have just been closed way
more people are dying in this country than being born a country that is closing up kindergartens
and housing cares are increasing and if nothing changes Japan could eventually just not exist if
you kind of extrapolate on the numbers it's going to happen when you actually look at these numbers
you see why they say that Japan could disappear schools are shutting down elementary schools
even junior high schools have been shut down one two three four kids in a class on the right is a
high school that has even shut down the past 10 years it starts with the small towns and cities
towns will die cities will die the gap between deaths and births is getting bigger in Japan
every city is going down Japan's population fell by more than half a million people last
year imagine if that happens every year so what happens when you have so many people leaving
what does that mean for infrastructure for public services hospitals schools and just look at this
chart which shows Japan's population projected decline the country will go from being the 11th
most populous country in the world to one day there will be less people in Japan than the
state of New Jersey only when Elon Musk tweeted Japan went ballistic and the government just kind
of freaked out Elon Musk is warning Japan will cease to exist this is such a common sight you
have so many abandoned stores like this across the city I'm visiting abandoned towns and interviewing
government officials and we are going to reuse the people at going out Japan has a huge elderly
population and it's home to the longest living people this is what a city hall looks like when
over a third of your population is over the age of 65. many young Japanese today don't want to
get married or have babies longer working hours you don't meet anybody there's no romance so what
happens when a town like this just completely ceases to exist and is a smaller population
actually a problem well yes I see depopulation is a problem decreasing the birth rate means
decreasing the number of Labor population drinking labor force has significant consequences GDP will
decline even more in addition to shrinking the economy it puts a massive strain on the country if
labor population decreases you have to support elderly people so the burden gets bigger and
bigger this is Tony Elementary School and this is kind of uh an example of what happens when
we don't find kind of reason or reuse purpose for elementary schools Jeff is a father of two living
in hakone it's only about an hour or so outside of Tokyo but it couldn't feel more different than
one of the world's most crowded cities about 10 years ago this Elementary School shut down
completely because there weren't enough students a lot of those children's clothes have also just
kind of been shut down or combined as well a kid growing up here might have more elderly friends
than friends their own age you have empty classrooms and what kind of an interesting
initiative my school took is the elementary school is four floors they moved all the kids up to the
top three floors because there were so many empty classrooms and they used the first floor as kind
of a community space for kind of the elderly in the neighborhood the kids in this neighborhood
that would normally be zoned for this school now have to go to another one and in some cases that
could mean a 45 minute drive finding kindergartens and preschools is quite a challenge for a lot
of adults as well it would have been nice to have kind of a bigger Community more kids to
play around with it's so crazy growing up myself in the west coast of the United States there's
always more population there's always new schools being built new homes being built so the idea of
a community a school in elementary school that just didn't have enough students to the point
where it had to completely shut down it's crazy Jeff is an exception see most people in Japan
are moving to bigger cities for more opportunities Tokyo is a wonderful place but as you can imagine
it's really busy not a lot of green I wanted to kind of expose them to more nature kind of less
structures a new initiative will pay parents more than seven thousand dollars per kid to
leave Tokyo especially kind of the transformation and kind of work styles for a lot of people a lot
of it can be done in the office and then commute time is in Japan It's Not Unusual to be an hour
an hour and a half One Way commute time but the truth is it's like the chicken or the egg see if
a town has less people and activities you don't want to move there and if people aren't moving
there well it'll only get more and more isolated what's really common is you'll have people here
in the 60s who've invested into raising their kids owning an open a place and the kind of the suburbs
with the kids understanding in their 20s and 30s we'll want to move out to the big city establish
their own lives and then don't feel obliged or want to come back and then that's where kind of
the abandoned in homes problems comes in you end up having towns with a lot of elderly people in
a restaurant like this you won't see any young workers in fact you'll see much older employees
another thing I notice is many abandoned homes in fact Japan has millions of them so you can see I
mean a lot of these places have signs they were businesses they were open for business and now
all you see is either their clothes or they're abandoned entirely with young people moving to
cities for better jobs there's a huge amount of homes just sitting empty with no one wanting to
buy or live in them they're on the rise there are many there are government initiatives to
create what are called kind of abandoned home Banks where they can be registered but one of
the big challenges these local administrations for Town Offices or city offices have is number
one finding who actually owns them a lot of times even if they are passed away finding the children
or who actually has the rights to those homes is also very difficult a closed business a closed
business a business that also just has kind of a negatively compounding effect in terms
of revitalization whether it be Community spirit I meet a local agent who's trying to revitalize the
town and encouraging people to open up a business well she's always she's taking a lot of kind of
abandoned houses and kind of introduced businesses so why is Japan's birth rate declined so dramatic
I'm in my 40s now our fathers kind of built Japan Inc so they were gone after we fell asleep so we
wouldn't see them at all they had the kind of Samurai Bushido spirit that were fighting for
the company and that has slowly changed I think that's our generation now is kind of a generation
that kind of missed out on that relationship maybe is trying to make up for that people saw their
parents overworked sacrificing a lot to work and raise a family but the new generation is rebelling
against that it's a big economic investment that I think even Japanese people are more interested
in maybe spending on themselves just a little bit more than back in the day Japan wants to encourage
people to have babies so they're giving money to new moms but many experts say that it's a losing
strategy and to really fix this problem it will need to allow more immigrants to come and also
accelerate robots in the workplace but more on that later I meet a professor outside of Tokyo to
understand what this all means for Japan's future shrinking population shrinking labor force and
aging population have negative impact on both sides of the economy on the demand side of the
economy so it means consumption households more elderly people it means less consumption Japan was
the second largest economy in the world but it was surpassed by China about 10 years ago but to stay
a large economy it will need to produce goods and services and people here need to spend money they
already have houses they no need to change their cars they married already so they expenditures
and the expenses on consumption is much lower but the trend of Disappearing towns is nothing new in
fact I'm taking a train to wakayama it's outside of Osaka the population here has been declining
for almost 30 years I go to its City Hall to understand just how bad the problem is here so
I just input that data from the city hall and this is really concerning more people are dying than
being born and more people are moving out than are moving in but what's really interesting when
you crunch the numbers is you see that yeah it's nothing new there are a lot more deaths than there
are birth but the scary part here is that the gap between deaths and births is getting bigger
a simple chart like this and it's no wonder why so many people are really concerned about the future
of Japan over a third of the population here is over the age of 65. where you have such a high
percentage of Elders roaming around the city not just going about their day to day but many of them
still working I'm here during an election season and I meet a candidate who is hoping to attract
more people to move here we are going to use the people at going out University will get some young
people from the outside City those young people are will I think I'm working in this city so
and they in this city population will get growing during his interview he said he's very optimistic
he wants wakayama to thrive he's excited about the upcoming colleges and universities and he said he
told me he thinks wakayama is going to grow the population is going to grow and while that sounds
great that might be wishful thinking because the numbers don't lie this is such a common
sight you have so many abandoned swords like this across the city you can definitely tell that the
infrastructure was built for way more people it gives it this really weird Eerie Sensation that
it's somewhat of a ghost town just take a street like this you have this as kind of an abandoned
shop over here I don't know what that was but over here you have a brand new sandwich shop
and it seems to be booming it seems to be doing pretty well there are people going in and out
but admittedly it is kind of random and you wonder like how a place like that can survive it's about
three o'clock on a Thursday and most of these shops are just completely vacant or shut down
this to me says it all this to me says a lot about what's happening in this city a lot about the
economy and and this is the representation you see many elders and a declining population you have to
wonder how a place like this can stay open it's an ice cream shop they sell waffles they sell ice
cream they're kind of off the beaten path I mean you don't have foot traffic you don't make money
and when you don't make money you can't stay in business and when you can't stay in business you
leave this restaurant behind me is only open for dinner from six to nine that's three hours many
of the businesses that do exist in the city are closed a lot of the times I've seen coffee shops
that are closed all day on Tuesdays and Thursdays or a restaurant that's only open Friday Saturday
Sunday this is because you have a lack of demand there's not a lot of customers it's also hard to
find people to work so what other options do you have but to be open for a few hours here a few
hours there it's become fairly common to take an abandoned building demolish it and then just put a
parking lot here because there is more use to park cars there than for anything else and what about
the people who do stay here I mean they're the ones kind of fighting for its existence and its
future but even many of the young young people I meet here tell me that they want to move they want
to go to Osaka they want to go to Tokyo where the big city is where the action is I want to move to
somewhere because actually I gonna change my job I want to be an illustrator so even though the
population is going down here he tells me that the Coffee Culture is getting quite popular and
I meet a hotel and Cafe owner who's also quite optimistic our company Misha is to revitalize
this area despite Japan being a rich country with a strong economy it has a higher debt to GDP ratio
than Venezuela or Lebanon and this government debt is causing a bigger crisis to the low birth rate
crisis see with fewer babies being born and more people getting old the government has to spend a
lot of money on pensions health care and social support which makes it increase its debt almost
one third of the Japanese government budget is for the Social Security since there are fewer working
folks to pay taxes while the government struggles to bring in enough money and they'll have to
decide do they spend their money supporting the elderly or encouraging young families one third
of the budget is going to elderly people so if you don't have enough younger population if you
don't have enough working population you don't have enough taxpayers to finance the government
budget there's going to be a reckoning day for Japanese debt at some point the debt to GDP ratio
in Japan there's no comparison around the world there's only so long you can have the Central Bank
buy buy up your own banknotes that will also endangering the future of the pension system
in Japan which is very serious it's kind of scary to think what that's going to look like but to be
able to navigate that economic turmoil that will have to come at some point is kind of hopefully my
kids will have the skills and abilities to kind of navigate that in the future for Japan to be saved
there are three changes that could happen the first is to increase the number of women having
babies in Japan and to do this they need to give more incentives but a lot of those efforts are
just not working 50 000 Japanese yen to give birth to one child's about equivalent of maybe four
thousand dollars they should be paying pregnant women and make it more helpful and supporting
environment they're doing what they can do there's a certain line in terms of what responsibility
they have what kind of pressure they can give to the individual they can incentivize them through
economic bonuses but how much does a couple hundred dollars do for a family over 20 years
the second one is to allow more immigrants so about two percent of Japan's population are
immigrants but compare that to the US where around 14 of the population are immigrants
in Germany which is 17 immigration is the way to handle more jobs than there is for people
so many people gonna be against allowing so many immigration because Japanese is you know
so normal culture it's not very common to see foreigners there are several reasons behind
this so one reason is social reason cultural reasons Japan used to be very closed country
toward foreigners people are very worried about integration in the Japanese Society it's more
assimilation rather than kind of an Embrace of different cultures Japan is easing some
of its restrictions and actually giving out more visas for high-skilled workers to move
here but despite these initiatives the country Still Remains very isolated from new cultures
it's a mentality geographically as well we're not connected to any other country so there's no easy
way to get in or out of Japan the third solution is to increase robots and have them take on more
jobs one solution to operational decreasing is I think it's robot or using original intelligence by
increasing robots into society it will make Japan more efficient so imagine robots in the service
industry you're helping take care of the elderly or in Industrial Automation whatever happens the
government will need to take drastic action we need reforms for example reforms regarding the
working population increasing the retirement age bringing more females as a labor force accepting
more migrants from other countries and so on if you let the economy shrink so it means that you
will have a small economy that majority of your population are retired and this small
portion of younger generation they wouldn't tolerate to pay for these huge Social Security
pension and so on but will Japan turn into a poor country government wouldn't have enough
budget for developing infrastructure paying for the education for military purposes and
so on back in wakayama I can't stop thinking about how a story like this ends you have to
wonder what a city like wakayama looks like in 10 years or maybe even five years when you have
such a large percentage that are graying that are old that are just not living much longer so far
it's apparent that 12 people left the town six people died the government data here is really
quite thorough they even put on the front page there was a 2.1 percent increase in garbage being
collected which if you think about it it's kind of an exciting sign because you need people to create
garbage the population declining Japan needs to preserve a lot of its culture I don't know
how the government's going to do it will drastic changes be made what happens to these abandoned
homes or will Japan just one day completely cease to exist without young people moving here without
new blood without new babies what is a society what is a city is it just return back to Nature
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