Alone in Japan: A Journey to the Future, Tom Feiling, Allen Lane, £25

Japan has long been considered a success story, boasting high levels of economic and social wellbeing, enviable technology and super-fast railways. But the country has stopped growing financially and started ageing. 

In 1950, just five per cent of Japanese people were over 65. By 2070, over-65s are anticipated to make up almost 40 per cent of the population. As for the economy, since the early 1990s – when living standards started to flatline and Japan entered the first of its ‘Lost Decades’ – the country has experienced among the weakest rates of wage growth in the developed world. It is a remarkable downturn for an economic superpower that in 1968 became the second largest economy, after the US, when it surpassed West Germany.

This plunge is what Alone in Japan by Tom Feiling is about. Having grown up in the 1980s, when Japan’s cultural power was at its zenith, he, like so many, viewed the country as ‘a beacon, lighting the way to a high-tech future…’ Disillusioned with the UK, he landed at Narita Airport in 1990, aged 22, to teach English. Returning in 2017, aged almost 50, meant going back to a very different country. The scale of Japan’s financial and demographic downswing quickly flummoxes him, and seeking answers, he travels the country, talking to the old and young, in the cities and in the countryside. It is his earlier experience, paired with a hiatus of two decades or so, that provides Feiling with a unique perspective as he digs into the challenges facing modern Japan, a country he views with an aficionado’s eye.

The book is split into three parts – the city, the country and the future – and he finds large and small indicators of decay almost everywhere he goes. He tells us that in the early 1990s, before the impact of the downturn really hit, ‘nobody would have dreamed of buying second-hand goods’. But they do now. As for the demographic transformation, he found it to be changing everything, ‘from the savings rate to the country’s rural wildlife, food consumption to road building. Across the country, schools were closing for want of pupils, and robots were being drafted in to lead funeral services’.

Feiling offers insights into everyday Japan, and the lightness of his prose carries the weightier, statistics-driven material. He regularly pops out for ‘a smoke’, has a thing for vending machines and casual dinners of miso ramen, gyoza and cold beer. In the countryside, we meet tanuki, a kind of racoon dog believed to have magical powers, a taste for sake, and ‘huge testicles’.

If it is hard to picture Japan’s deterioration from afar, he makes it easy for us: ‘The population shrank by 644,000 in 2021, 730,000 in 2022 and 837,000 in 2023. That is the equivalent of losing a city the size of Glasgow or San Francisco every year.’ Last year, the population stood at 124 million. By 2070, it will likely have fallen to 87 million.

As well as a low mortality rate and high life expectancy, the county’s low birth rate is having a huge impact. In 1974, Japan’s fertility rate fell below 2.1 children per woman, the rate required to maintain a stable population. That was long before any other country. As he points out, plenty of other nations now have a lower fertility rate – among them Italy, Spain, Ukraine and Bosnia – but because Japanese women started having fewer children before anyone else, their country started seeing the consequences first. In 2024, not a single country in the developed world had a fertility rate above the replacement level of 2.1. As has so often been the case, the Japanese were ahead.

Japan’s population collapse and ageing demographic is a warning sign for other developed nations. Feiling takes Britain as an example. When the UK’s National Health Service was founded in 1948, there were around a quarter of a million people in Britain in their late eighties or older. ‘Today, there are more than 1.5 million Britons in their late eighties or older, and there are predicted to be almost six million by the end of the century.’ Mass ageing is an existential threat, but that doesn’t make it newsworthy, he argues. ‘In the age of the 24-hour news cycle, it is always going to be pushed off the front page by more dramatic events.’

The other issue, often cited by foreign analysts, is Japan’s reluctance to open the country to large-scale immigration. ‘Discrimination against foreigners is rife (as well as perfectly legal) in the housing market… The message is clear: “Come and work in Japan, but don’t think you’re welcome to stay.”’ Some in Japan believe labour demands can be offset by robots and AI.

It’s not the same everywhere in the country. As Feiling notes, in thriving, modern Tokyo, ’arguably the only big city that really works’, there is little crime, unemployment is low, strikes are practically unheard of, and the giant ageing process is least apparent: ‘Wandering the manicured boulevards of Aoyama and Omotesando, it is easy to get lost in the perpetual present and put the gloomy predictions of the country’s demographers out of mind’. Remarkably, the average age of the buildings in Tokyo is just 28, ‘which is far younger than the average age of its inhabitants: 44’. But still, venture into the suburbs and cracks start to appear. When a population starts shrinking, you see it first in suburbia because ‘the demand for housing weakens, driving down land prices’. Outside Tokyo, more urban decay is apparent. In Osaka, 17 per cent of homes are vacant.

Among Japan’s mountain communities, there are other challenges. Shrines and temples lay abandoned. There are no thatchers left in Shimane prefecture for the old farmhouses. Japanese farmers, with an average age of 69, are the oldest in the world. And now that humans are older and fewer, the animals are getting bolder. Unlike people, bears are on the rise: in 2024, the black bear population was at 44,000, up from 15,000 estimated in 2012.

What is behind Japan’s demographic crisis? Much of the blame has to lie with a culture of overwork. There is even a word for this, karōshi, meaning ‘death through overwork’. Japanese workers still average about two hours’ overtime a day, and a fifth of them put in more than 50 hours a week. But while many believe that nothing will change until women feel able to combine motherhood with having a career (and most likely looking after ageing parents), that isn’t the only issue. Fewer people are marrying, and having a child outside of marriage is still frowned upon (‘even cohabiting between unmarried couples is dogged by bureaucratic disapproval’). In 2022, Japan registered just 4.1 new marriages per thousand inhabitants, in 1970 it was 10 per thousand.

Towards the end of the book, Feiling travels to Akita and Aomori, the two northernmost prefectures of mainland Japan. For every child born in Akita, three people die. With ‘two people disappearing every hour’, the prefecture is experiencing the fastest rate of population decline in the country. Here, he meets a man named Hiroyuki Sato, a serial entrepreneur, born in Akita City in 1961. Back in 2014, Sato tells Fieling, the Policy Council’s Subcommittee on Population Decline Issues had warned that Akita prefecture was ‘in danger of extinction’. But, Sato is pushing back against pessimism: ‘The media doesn’t study the future. You have to look ahead, and you have to exercise some willpower. I am optimistic.’ He believes the future must include revitalising smaller cities and weakened regions that have been sucked up by Tokyo: ‘This prefecture has a lot of potential – delicious food, great sake, a more relaxed way of life.’ Sato’s wind power business is generating more power than is needed. Sadly, he is an anomaly. Most people Feiling meets, while good at keeping up appearances, are resigned about the population plunge, viewing it as inevitable.

Back in 2014, Granta magazine put out a special Japan issue, with a back blurb that declared: ‘Everyone knows this country and no one knows it.’ That still rings true, but Tom Feiling knows it better than most and he makes for a superb guide not only to that country, but to our own uncertain futures. As he warns, projections indicate that the implications of population decline will be profound – if the current fertility rate continues, the last Japanese person will die sometime around the year 2643.