A few years ago The Daily Telegraph reported an unlikely story, an elderly crime wave in Japan. As Form 4 (IGCSE) discovered, this is a surprising side affect of an ageing population in Japan.
Japan is a country at stage 5 of the demographic transition model, where the birth rate is low, the life expectancy is high and the population is in gradual decline. As a result of the low birth rate and long life expectancy, there are an increasing number of elderly people who need taking care of, but not enough number of economically active people to pay taxes to support them. In other words it has a high dependency ratio. In 2011 for every 100 workers in Japan the country had to support the needs of almost 60 people.
Japan's dependency ratio 2011
DEPENDENTS 16 500 000 (Young) + 31 900 000 (Elderly) x 100 = 59.8
Economically Active 80 910 000 (Workers)
Below one of the form 4 students, Daniel writes a diary imaging he is Yuki, a fictional Japanese pensioner recently sent to jail.
I feel a lot better here in jail. I feel a lot happier because there are finally people willing to take care of me. There are a lot of other people here who came here for the same reason as I did; all are around my age.
Honestly, I don’t think it’s actually our fault that we committed these crimes. Some of us don’t have any children to look after us and it feels lonely sometimes. Those that do have children are sometimes left at the shelter for homeless people. In jail we don’t have to work so hard for food because they provide meals for us.
We really don’t have a home to go back to and when my time in jail has finished and I will honestly commit a crime again just to stay here a little longer.
If the retirement age remains fixed, and the life expectancy increases, there will be relatively more people claiming pension benefits and less people working and paying income taxes. In Japan, there are more elderly people than the younger people so there is not a big enough workforce to cover the costs for the elderly people. With a shortage of workers, it will push up the wages causing wage inflation. Aside of not having enough money, the government also increased the sales tax for the first time in 17 years. This is making life harder for everyone.
