The tipping point for virtually all of Japan’s big cities other than Tokyo would be 2035, wrote Masashi Kawai in Future Atlas: What Happens in Japan with a Declining Population. Additionally, he noted that several smaller cities were expected to experience decline even before then.
In his book, Kawai said population trends indicated that by 2020, nine major cities, including Kitakyushu, Kobe, Kyoto and Osaka had already experienced a population decline compared to 2015. By 2025, Sendai, Yokohama, and Kumamoto will join this group, followed by Nagoya, Sapporo, Hiroshima, and Okayama by 2035.
While some larger cities will avoid contraction by absorbing people from surrounding areas, that source of additional population will be depleted within the next decade, according to Kawai.
Population loss will not be the only challenge for these urban areas by 2035, but also the need to cater to a growing elderly population.
In a decade, 34.8 per cent of Kobe’s residents will be elderly, with Sapporo, Shizuoka and Kitakyushu close behind at 34.6 per cent. Among the 20 designated cities examined by Kawai, all will have an elderly population exceeding 25 per cent.
