2X as likely to see an old person on the street as a kid

[Taro Toporific]

Japan's tops 10 million old farts and they all seem to be in my seat on the train at 4:45pm.
10 million Japanese 75 or older
Yomiuri Shimbun June 11, 2003
The number of people aged 75 or older topped 10 million for the first time last year as the aging of Japanese society advanced...

[Pizzicatoblue]

eeeewwwwwururhgtgugh!!

[Taro Toporific]

:x eeeewwwwwururhgtgugh!!

No running away from global race to woo foreign talent
Aug 16 / The Straits Times

... By 2050, Japan will have 30 per cent fewer people and a staggering one million 100-year-olds, The New York Times reported recently.
... A recent United Nations report noted that Japan needs as many as 17 million new immigrants by 2050 to address its people shortfall.
If this happened, foreigners would make up 18 per cent of the population, a leap from the present 1 per cent. Notoriously averse to foreigners, Japan has absorbed just one million people from abroad in the past 25 years.
...Little wonder then that Japanese population expert Hiroshi Komai was quoted by the NYT as saying: 'Societies have always risen and faded, and Japan will likely disappear and something else will take its place, but that's not such a problem. Greece and Rome disappeared too.'
In both Germany and Japan, the solution - namely, immigration - is itself a major political problem, sparking fears among the local population about foreigners taking their jobs and changing their societies.

[Taro Toporific]

:x eeeewwwwwururhgtgugh!!

Professor discusses sharply dipping birth rates
Sunday, September 21, 2003/
...Japan might shrink as much as 20 percent. A little shrinkage might be fine for such a geographically small nation, but there are some statistics that by 2050, there will be two elderly people for every child under the age of 18. That means you'll be twice as likely to see an elderly person on the street as you will a child. It's not clear how long a nation-state can survive with those kinds of demographics. In the U.S., any swell in fertility rates comes not from native-born women but from immigrants. It's their children who are saving us....

[ramchop]

but there are some statistics that by 2050, there will be two elderly people for every child under the age of 18.

by 2050 pretty much all the FGs will be one of those elderly. People will be thinking " eeeewwwwwururhgtgugh!!" when they see you Pizzicatoblue :P

[Steve Bildermann]

...Japan might shrink as much as 20 percent. A little shrinkage might be fine for such a geographically small nation, but there are some statistics that by 2050, there will be two elderly people for every child under the age of 18.

Bad Science Alert

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore ... in the Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long ... seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. ... There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.