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TOKYO: There is no use trying to hide it: The great inflection point has finally arrived. Japan’s population of traffic lights, in lagging correlation with its human population, has flipped from expansion to contraction.

Many lights, creaking and in disrepair, are now approaching the upper limits of life expectancy. Roads, especially in the countryside where population decline is more starkly visible, are emptying of traffic. So from this year, police recently told local media, more traffic lights will be decommissioned than newly installed or replaced.

Demographic forces, as we know, stop at nothing. Japan, in increasing alarm over their long-term consequences, no longer has to look far for these jabbing reminders of life-as-we-know-it change. But the timing of the traffic light inflection is significant. 

The country is now almost two months into its so-called “2025 Problem” – the stage where the enormous baby boomer generation born after World War II completes its move from the official category of merely “elderly” to “advanced elderly”. 

As matters stood last year, 16.8 per cent of Japanese are already in this 75-and-above bracket and an object of intensifying scrutiny for governments and companies around the world who are facing their own versions of the phenomenon.

IMPACT OF AGEING POPULATION STARTS TO BITE

For years, economists, sociologists and others have warned that 2025 would be the point where, after the comparatively sedate shift experienced so far in Japan, everything really started to bite.

The practical impacts of mass ageing are suddenly more dramatic and potent. And, inevitably, more boomer-y in flavour.

Few events illustrate this more powerfully than the Care Japan Show – a sprawling trade fair held in Tokyo this week. It showcased the many industries, both Japanese and international, that are either already involved in, or rapidly adapting to the service of the very old.

Much of it – the robots for lifting people out of bed and other gadgetry of elderly care – will be familiar to anyone following Japan’s evolving approach. A heavy reliance on human-administered care, and immigration, to offset indigenous labour shortages in the care industry is more or less inevitable. But so too is Japan’s faith that it can assemble a half-decent army of automata.

Tonally, however, this year’s show marked a distinct and important shift.

Until now, the subjects of “advanced elderly” care were for the most part Japan’s prewar generation. This cohort undoubtedly enjoyed many of the benefits of the country’s postwar economic resurgence and subsequent economic “miracle”, but were never entirely defined by those forces. 

GROWING OLD IN GOOD TASTE AND VANITY

The huge incoming wave of advanced elderly, though, was precisely defined in that way.

And you can now clearly discern the idea that standards and salesmanship should be raised to meet the combination of good taste, vanity and faddishness that made the baby boomer generation what it is.

At the show, health supplements and beauty products for the over-75s abounded; large crowds gathered around a vibrating sofa based on technology to help returning astronauts. It will supposedly wobble the user to better physical and mental health. 

Food was a significant feature but with a striking emphasis on preserving the appearance of the high life, while accommodating the realities of age, infirmity and the fact that accidental inhalation of food or drink now ranks just behind heart disease and senility among the top killers of Japanese. 

Highlights included a range of mousses, carefully crafted and flavoured to look and taste like a juicy steak or a succulent fillet of mackerel but requiring no chewing. The country’s biggest producer of green tea has developed a no-choke formula for its top-end matcha. One of Japan’s largest sausage makers had diversified into elegant tea cakes, petits fours and other dainties designed for the toothless gourmet.

The show, quite naturally, presented the most optimistic imagery of how the 2025 problem will play out.

And that will have confirmed, for some, the warning that even now neither Japan’s boomers nor perhaps those around them have fully appreciated. Namely the crisis that their age and numbers are about to thrust the country into. 

Japan feels poised for a number of inflection points – some predictable, others that may seem to spring from nowhere. Nobody is really expecting old age to burn and rave at close of day. As a driver of more urgent policymaking, though, Japan should perhaps rage, rage against the dying of the traffic light.