When Tom Feiling lived in Tokyo in the early 1990s, Japan was a vision of the future: prosperous, peaceful, and incredibly high tech. A place where science fiction existed next to centuries old Shinto shrines.
He returned to the country nearly twenty-five years later to find some of the shine had worn off. Japan still looks like the future, but it is a troubling future, and a warning.
Its population is aging and shrinking. Inflation is finally setting in after decades of economic stagnation. People are choosing solitude over companionship. And countryside villages are being abandoned as their last residents die off.
Why are couples ceasing to pair up and have children? How will Japan pay for the needs of its rapidly aging population, and who will look after them? Will robots save the day? Feiling asked these questions in villages and farms, city coffee shops and seedy bars, and he interviewed people affected by this crisis and those who are trying to fix it.
Some similar version of demographic decline is only a couple decades away for Western Europe and North America. What’s happening in Japan will affect us all.
Tom Feiling is the author of Alone in Japan, Short Walks From Bogota, and The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took Over the World. You can read more about him on his website.
We spoke about Japan’s culture of overwork, extreme forms of solitude, sex doll showrooms, and attempts to save village life and big city prosperity.
These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:
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