Elderly people in Japan

This article focuses on the situation of elderly people in Japan and the recent changes in society.

Japan's population is aging. During the 1950s, the percentage of the population in the 65-and-over group remained steady at around 5%. Throughout subsequent decades, however, that age group expanded, and by 1989 it had grown to 11.6% of the population. It was expected to reach 16.9% by 2000 and almost 25.2% by 2020. Perhaps the most outstanding feature of this trend was the speed with which it was occurring in comparison to trends in other industrialised nations. In the United States, expansion of the 65-and-over age group from 7% to 14% took 75 years; in the United Kingdom and Germany, this expansion took 45 years. The same expansion in Japan only took 24.5 years, passing 7% in late 1970 and 14% in early 1995.