Brad Rozairo, OMI – Japan’s population is rapidly ageing. This year, before the “Respect-for-the-Aged Day” event, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications released its population survey. According to that, the number of elderly people in Japan surged by 20,000 from September 2023 to 36.25 million! The main reason for this is depopulation.
Having peaked at 128 million, the population of Japan has come down to 125 million, and it may go further down. Behind this trend lies the country’s low birth rate, perhaps the biggest crisis Japan is facing right now. The government may have taken measures to tackle this issue, but more young people either choose to remain single or even if they marry, are reluctant to have children because of less job prospects, cost of living, social norms etc. It seems that the younger generation is more for an independent lifestyle and prefers being alone. This is a huge change in the traditionally group-oriented country.
Against this backdrop, the island nation was forced to open its doors looking for support from outside to take care of its elderly population. Since 2008, through economic partnership agreements, Japan has been receiving health caregivers from Asia, mostly from Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines. In an ethnically homogeneous country, it is not very easy to work as caregivers. There are many challenges such as the language, immigration procedures, social and cultural barriers etc. Other factors include long hours of work and low pay, co-worker relationships, discrimination at the workplace, and a balance between work and life that leads to poor health. But despite different challenges, the caregivers are doing their best in caring for the elderly.
On the one hand, Japan brings people from outside to help the society, but on the other hand, it is also killing its people! I was shocked and disturbed by what I read recently. Have you heard about “Plan 75”? It’s a movie about people over the age of seventy-five volunteering to give up their lives. The Japanese government has introduced this program so that the elderly do not become a “burden” to those around them. Japan is destroying life by introducing voluntary euthanasia where the elderly can painlessly slip away from this world. What a sad end to one’s life. It’s so inhuman for a wealthy nation, highly recognized by the world to offer death instead of finding ways and means to protect life.
Last year, Pope Francis during a press conference aboard the papal plane from Marseille to Rome, condemned euthanasia and abortion and spoke about “bad compassion” and said, “You don’t play with life, neither at the beginning nor at the end”.
In 2019 when Pope Francis made a pastoral visit to Japan, in one of his speeches he said that “in the end, the civility of every nation or people is measured not by its economic strength, but by the attention it devotes to those in need and its capacity to be fruitful and promote life.” Japan, the only country to have suffered the atomic bombing should not forget the thousands of lives lost during wartime. But, it looks like it was a remote past event and no one worries about it anymore.
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