This is the year Japan will really start to feel its age

By Noah Sneider, East Asia bureau chief, The Economist

The notion of a greying Japan is nothing new. But 2025 is when the country will really start to feel its age. Japan’s baby-boomers, some 7m-8m people known as the dankai, born between 1947 and 1949, will all be 75 or older. The total number of over-75s will reach nearly 22m, up from 17m a decade ago. The growth in ever-creakier old folks will ripple through Japan’s social systems, pushing up health and pension costs while the tax base shrinks. The government projected in 2018 that overall social-security costs, including pension payments, will increase by nearly 60% between 2025 and 2040. Policymakers refer to this as the “2025 problem”.