Japan’s Diaper Shift and Global Population Trends
Tokyo is still mostly a bustling, crowded supercity. But the quiet and emptiness I saw with my son this fall in the greenway adjacent to the Imperial Palace grounds in Tokyo could be more commonplace later in this century given the aging of the Japanese population. Indeed, a recent government study, cited last year in the Wall Street Journal’s Japan blog, projected that the city population “will peak at 13.35 million in 2020 — then drop steadily to 7.13 million in the year 2100.”
But the indicator of demographic shifts that got me writing today was a diaper trend noted by my longtime contact on population and immigration, Joseph Chamie. Here’s an excerpt from the Asahi Shimbun article he forwarded:
As Japan’s birthrate declines and its population ages, the country’s future can be foreseen in diaper sales.
Over the past decade, production of adult diapers, essential for caring for the elderly, has doubled in Japan.
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However the UN is really predicting ~ 11 billion by 2100 revkin.tumblr.com