Demography
The age pyramid of the Japanese population is that of an elderly country, although the average age at Tōkyō is slightly lower than that found in the rest of the country. The country has one of the highest life expectancies in the world (87 years for women and 81 years for men). In addition, the declining birth rate is leading to a decrease in the population. The changeover took place in 2005. For the first time since 1899, Japan's population was down from the previous year. Today, more than 28% of the population is over 65 years of age. Japan has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, with 7.5 births per 1,000 people per year. The Land of the Rising Sun is now one of the oldest countries in the world, along with Italy and Germany. The city centres are inhabited by a younger, often single population, while families and the elderly are found on the urban periphery. Generally speaking, the Japanese countryside is experiencing a significant ageing process with a rural exodus of young people to the cities (for work). Many departments are now trying to boost the birth rate by providing financial assistance to families wishing to have a third child. In 2019, Aichi l Prefecture launched a project, called Aichi Migration Support Project, which offered a bonus of one million yen to Tokyo families to come and settle there, with the aim of repopulating and revitalizing the region.
Birth
Japan has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. The current rate is 7.5 per 1000 inhabitants compared to 11 in France. Japanese women have an average of 1.43 children, compared to 1.92 in France, 1.77 in the United States and 2.24 in India, for example. This rate therefore does not allow for the renewal of generations. Without significant immigration over the next few years, the Japanese population will continue to decline. For several years now, the State has been encouraging couples to have children by offering parents a bonus. In Japan, first names are composed, which explains the wide variety of the genre. That said, there are many more female than male first names. For girls, many of them include " ko " ("child"), " mi " ("beautiful" in Chinese) or " ri " ("reason" in Chinese).
Composition
Japan's population is one of the most homogeneous in the world. According to official sources, there are less than 2.5 million foreigners in Japan, or about 3% of the population. In comparison, industrialized countries have about 10% of their population with an immigrant background. Japan has recorded two waves of immigration in its history: the first from China and Korea during the colonial period, and the second from Latin America, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand in the 1980s. There is relative discrimination against Japanese people of Chinese or Korean origin. After the Second World War, they lost their Japanese nationality, which did not facilitate their integration. Over time, Japanese citizenship cards had been distributed, but approximately 500,000 individuals, belonging to the descendants of that wave of immigration in the 1930s, were still living with the status of "special permanent resident". Today, Koreans constitute the largest foreign community in Japan. It is not so easy to become Japanese. The law of the land does not necessarily prevail. Today and since the 1990s, a "chosen" immigration policy has been in place. The authorities give preference to South Americans of Japanese origin. They have never hidden their intention to maintain an ethnically and culturally homogenous nation. It is therefore not surprising that Japan's third largest foreign community is of Brazilian origin. Immigration remains a recurrent theme in Japan. For in order to maintain the current share of its working population in the overall population, the authorities have no choice but to attract foreigners.
Language
In Japan, 124 million Japanese speak... Japanese. The remaining millions, of immigrant origin, are trying to do so, with varying degrees of success. Apart from Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and English are the common languages heard, even if they remain marginal. A few dialects are spoken by people, mainly from other parts of the archipelago. Japanese has developed, among others, on and around dialects from the Kansai region (Kyōto, the former capital). From the seventeenth century onwards, it was built around the main dialect of the region of Kantō, and thus, the one practiced at Tōkyō. The growing political weight of Edo allowed the influence of this dialect in Japanese as it is practiced today. In order to find all the signs necessary for writing Japanese, one must be familiar with three systems: kanji (characters borrowed from Chinese), katakana andhiragana. The last two are nothing more than syllabary alphabets. As with Chinese, Japanese is traditionally written from top to bottom and right to left, with no spaces between words. This type of formatting is called tategaki. Japanese script is thought to date from 400 BC. Influenced by Chinese characters, it was not completed until the eighth century, then the nineteenth century, with the creation of the katakana by Kibi-no-mabi, and the hiragana, invented by the Buddhist saint, Kōbô-daishi.
