Tracking Japan’s Shift to a Post-Demographic Society

During the years of high-paced growth, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, almost everyone in Japan identified as a member of the middle class. With incomes and living standards rising across the board, Japan’s postwar mass society was converging toward a middle-class consciousness. But all was not harmony and uniformity. The older and younger generations clashed over tradition and modernity. Sharp class distinctions divided white-collar university graduates from blue-collar workers, farmers, and shop owners. Gender roles were rigidly defined, severely restricting opportunities for women. And domestic politics boiled down to a choice between left and right, reflecting the ideological and geopolitical battle lines of the Cold War. Economic leveling notwithstanding, it was a period that lent itself to clear social differentiation and demographic pigeonholing.

Fifty years on, Japanese researchers in the field of quantitative social science are finding it harder and harder to deduce who is thinking what on the basis of demographics like age. And this is making it more and more challenging to predict the direction in which Japanese society is heading.

Limits of Marxian Materialism

As project leader for the Stratification and Social Psychology Project, I have been involved in a longitudinal survey designed to maintain comparability with a survey on the same theme carried out in 1985 and 1995. The aim is to monitor and anticipate changes in Japanese society by gathering data on class identity, satisfaction with life, perceptions of economic inequality, attachment to traditional values, views on gender equality and education, anxiety about the future, trust in others, work and family life, involvement in civil society, political consciousness, and proclivity for consumption.

The demographic factors believed to influence such attitudes include gender, age, and such social attributes as class (as reflected in education level, occupation, and income), family situation, and regional ties. Our research has focused on how one’s position within the social structure influences one’s psychological state. This approach is based on a framework of understanding extending back to Karl Marx, who held that people’s social consciousness (subjective state) was determined by their economic relationships (objective status).

In Japan, however, the predictive power of analytical models predicated on this relationship between objective and subjective states has been declining since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Disparities in attitudes among people in different occupations, income brackets, and age groups have become less clear-cut. Nor do factors like family makeup, place of residence, social network, or social participation offer much insight. In other countries, attitudes often diverge along ethnic, religious, and regional lines, but the influence of these factors is relatively weak in Japanese society.

Emergence of a Post-Demographic Society

A 2023 study published by the Hakuhōdō Institute of Life and Living underscores this observation with respect to age-related differences in values. Analyzing the results of the Chronological Lifestyle Survey, carried out in Japan since 1992, researchers concluded that age-linked disparities were gradually fading. (The term they coined for this trend was shōreika shakai, a play on the ubiquitous term kōreika shakai, or aging society).

The authors of the study highlight two key features of Japan’s emerging post-demographic society. The first is the gradual blurring of age-linked differences in social attitudes among those between the ages of 20 and 70, who make up the core of adult society. In previous analyses of opinion surveys and market research, it was fairly easy to pigeonhole people by generation—baby boomers, the lost generation, the second baby boom, the employment ice age generation, and so forth. But the Hakuhōdō study concluded that the psychological disparities among such age groups have begun to fade.

This is not to say that Japanese attitudes and opinions are becoming more uniform; quite the contrary. The second characteristic of Japan’s post-demographic society is the heterogeneity of views and values within each age group. Ideological and attitudinal diversity is on the rise, but researchers are increasingly at a loss to analyze those differences in terms of demographics.

These changes are not readily visible in such descriptive statistical coefficients as mean and variance. They have taken place beneath the surface, in the connections between social consciousness and social structure. Moreover, they have occurred gradually (since there is no clear dividing line between the old and new generations), disguised in part by the large numbers of baby boomers and the relatively small number of young people in the Japanese population.

However, over the past few years, as the baby-boomers who had dominated the data for two decades began to age out of the survey sample, and youngsters born in the twenty-first century began to age in, researchers discerned a gradual dissolution of the old age-linked disparities, beginning with people born around the mid-1970s, during the second baby boom.

The Age of Low Expectations

To understand what precipitated this trend, we need to consider the economic and social background.

From the 1950s through the 1980s, near-continuous growth and development set the tone in Japanese society. But after the collapse of the 1980s asset bubble, Japan hit a postmodern plateau. The period of stagnation once dubbed the “lost decade” has dragged on for more than 30 years now.

What this means in terms of today’s population is that everyone born prior to the second baby boom entered adult society at a time when things still seemed to be getting better year by year. Young people equated their own era with progress in the form of greater affluence, a more democratic society, innovation, and advancement. They also lived in a world where—for better or for worse—employment was generally permanent, gender roles were clearly defined, and there was widespread agreement on the basic course people’s lives should follow. Although not everyone went along with this framework, almost all acknowledged it, and their place within it provided a firm basis for defining their own identity.

The products of the second baby boom were the last to grow up with the promise of a better life for everyone who followed the rules. Those born later, from the aptly named “lost generation” (young victims of post-bubble restructuring) to Generation Z, were raised amid the same level of affluence, but with a sense that things were going downhill. Unlike those born in the 1940s and 1950s, they perceived little quantitative difference, and only a subtle qualitative difference, between their lives and the lives of their elders.

Moreover, as the stagnation persisted beyond the first generation, young people grew more pessimistic about their chances of outstripping their parents in educational attainment, job advancement, and economic well-being. They were apt to dismiss the rules of a game that no longer delivered on its promise of a better life. The rejection of structures that previous generations took for granted has given rise to greater variability within each age group.

The Rise of Individualism

The result of all this is a new degree of individuality among the younger generations.

Political behavior offers an instructive example. For those born prior to the second baby boom, participation in national elections was a basic civic duty, and the choice was generally clear-cut: conservative or progressive, right or left. Within this polarized framework—which persists to this day—a person’s social and economic affiliations determined his or her political views and voting behavior.

For the younger generations, however, to vote or not to vote is purely a matter of individual choice, and how to vote, if one chooses to do so, hinges on one’s own judgment at that point in time. The typical young Japanese citizen, while politically literate, is an independent swing voter. This is what we mean when we talk about not knowing what members of the younger generation are thinking.

This is not to say that members of the younger generation are detached from society. Social forces continue to affect each person’s state of mind. But the crude conceptual framework by which sociologists once explained social trends no longer applies. Personal identity is no longer tied to such categories as “women,” “senior citizens,” “urbanites,” “university graduates,” or “high-income households.” For this reason, it is becoming difficult to characterize Japan as a society stratified by either class, age, or gender.

Another way to put it is that the views of the Japanese today defy our old demographic stereotypes. They are complex and varied, differentiated at the individual level. In sociological circles, we call this individualization.

As young people brought up during the lost decades have taken their place in adult society, generational disparities have faded. At the same time, individualization has intensified, making it a challenge to chart attitudes by gender, class, region, and other demographic factors. Without these tools to rely on, it is becoming more and more difficult to identify overarching trends and predict future developments in Japanese society.

(Originally published in Japanese. Banner photo: © Pixta.)