Foreseeing future Japanese society

Abstract

This paper tries to foresee the future Japanese society through surveying the long-time span changes after the World War II, with mainly based on the various statistic data. After pointing out three major directions of changes and five periods of the last 70 years, several basic data are presented, including those on population growth and economic growth rate. Then the paper discusses four particular topics, that is, changing household structure, changing life course, cultural homogenization, and “the lost 30 years” to characterize the Japanese responses toward the worldwide tendency of modernization and democratization. The concluding section presents the facing problems of Japanese society and the needed responses to them.