Taking the subway in Tokyo, I found two posters which advertize books. Interestingly, both were about the population issues of Japan. Even the posters show a lot.
Strike of Shrinking Japan ( 縮小日本の衝撃）
The books is based on a NHK documentary over demographic change in Japan. I've never watched it yet. There is a big graph in the poster which shows change of the population of Japan throughout the history and the projection for the start of 22nd century.
Population in Japan
2008: 128,000,000 (the peak)
2016: 127,100,000
2030: 119,130,000
2050: 109,192,000
2100: 59,720,000
In less than a century, the populaton will be less than half the current one!
The Chronicle of the Future ( 未来の年表）
2017: 1 in 3 Japanese women is over 65.
2018: National universities are on the verge of bankrupt.
2019: Supply of IT engineers is extremely short.
2021: There is massive shortage for caregivers for senior citizens.
2014: 1 in 3 Japanese is over 65.
2026: There are 7 million people who suffer from dementia and similar cognitive regressions.
2030: Departments, banks, and nursery facilities disappear in local areas.
2033: 1 in 3 houses is empty.
2040: Local municipalities face the risk of disapperaing.
I got an impression that Japanese society started to treat the problem of shrinking population quite seriously. I went to a bookstore called Yaesu near Tokyo Station to figure out what kind of books are popular these days. I found one of the two books on a shelf which was put to show the rankings of best sellers. Interestingly, 'The Chronicle of the Future' ( 未来の年表）was ranked as No. 1 in the newly released section. It was the first week of August. For now (2017/8/6), it is ranked as No. 4 as a whole.
I have paid attention to social pheonomena related to the demographic changes not only in Japan but also in South Korea. For now, one of the main issues in Korean society is the low birth rate. The population of South Korea is still growing but very soon it will face the same situation as Japan. There are still controversies over whether South Korea will face the same problems such as the abrupt falldown of prices of real estates and the potential growth rate, but most people agree that the matter is not whether South Korea will face the similar problems that Japan have gotten but how serious they will be. For the last five years, many books that observe Japanese sociey to get insights over how to overcome the obstacles South Korea will soon face have been published. One of them is 'Korean Economy, Money Starts to Betray '(타마키 타카시, '한국경제, 돈의 배반이 시작된다', 스몰빅인사이트(2016)).
The author, Tamaki Tadashi observed Korean society as a journalist working in NIKKEI for 30 years. He focused on the similarities between Japan and Korea and suggested that through studying the era so-called '20 years' of Japan, Korea can get a lot of clues to avoid the hardship Japan had faced. The most important thing which he concentrated among similarities is, of course, the demographic change. The reason I paid attention to the book posters was that I wanted to observe how Japan has been changing with the decrease of population. One thing I found was that Japanese feeling the effects and treating them more seriously than Koreans. I checked the ranking of the best seller books in Korea this week(2017/8/6). There was only one book related to democraphic changes, Myeonggyeonmanri(명견만리). It was ranked 7th.( as far as I know, the book became popular becasue President Moon recommended people to read it not because people became quite interested in demographic changes in Korea).
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