New Geography

Tag: Japan

  • Death Spiral Demographics: The Countries Shrinking The Fastest

    For most of recent history, the world has worried about the curse of overpopulation. But in many countries, the problem may soon be too few people, and of those, too many old ones. In 1995 only one country, Italy, had more people over 65 than under 15; today there are 30 and by 2020 that number will hit 35. Demographers estimate that global population growth will end this century.

    Rapid aging is already reshaping the politics and economies of many of the most important high-income countries. The demands of older voters are shifting the political paradigm in many places, including the United States, at least temporarily to the right. More importantly, aging populations, with fewer young workers and families, threaten weaker economic growth, as both labor and consumption begin to decline.

    We took a look at the 56 countries with populations over 20 million people, nine of which are already in demographic decline. The impact of population decline will worsen over time, particularly as the present generation now in their 50s and 60s retires, begins drawing pensions and other government support.

    Europe: Homeland of Demographic Decline

    Heading up our list of slowly dissipating large countries is the Ukraine, a country chewed at its edges by its aggressive Russian neighbor. According to U.N. projections, Ukraine’s population will fall 22% by 2050. Eastern and Southern Europe are home to several important downsizing countries including Poland (off 14% by 2050), the Russian Federation (-10.4%), Italy (-5.5%) and Spain (-2.8%). The population of the EU is expected to peak by 2050 and then gradually decline, suggesting a dim future for that body even if it holds together.

    The most important EU country, Germany, has endured demographic decline for over a generation. Germany’s population is forecast to drop 7.7% by 2050, though this projection has not been adjusted to account for the recent immigration surge. The main problem is the very low fertility rate of the EU’s superpower, which according to United Nations data was 1.4 between 2010 and 2015. It takes a fertility rate of 2.1% to replace your own population so we can expect Germany to shrink as well as get very old.

    Nor can Europe expect much help from its smaller countries. Although too small to reach our 20 million person threshold, many of Europe’s tinier “frontier” countries have abysmal fertility rates. Among the 10 smaller countries with the greatest population declines, all are in Europe, and outside Western Europe, with Bulgaria’s population expected to shrink 27% by 2050 and Romania’s 22%. Each of these have below replacement rate fertility. Things are not that much better in Western Europe, where fertility rates are also below replacement rates, but not quite so low. Long-term, the only option for Europe may be to allow more immigration, particularly from Africa and the Middle East, although this may be impossible due to growing political resistance to immigration.

    Demographic Decline: The Asian Edition

    If this were just a European disease, it would not prove such a challenge to the economic future. Europe is gradually diminishing in global importance. The big story in demographic trends is in Asia, which has driven global economic growth for the past generation. The decline of Japan’s population is perhaps best known; the great island nation, still the world’s third largest economy, is expected to see its population fall 15% by 2050, the second steepest decline after Ukraine, and get much older. By 2030, according to the United Nations, Japan will have more people over 80 than under 15.

    But the biggest hit on the world economy from the new demographics will come from China, the planet’s second largest economy, and the most dynamic.

    Until a generation ago, overpopulation threatened China’s future, as it still does some developing countries. Today the estimates of the country’s fertility rate run from 1.2 to 1.6, both well below the 2.1 replacement rate. By 2050 China’s population will shrink 2.5%, a loss of 28 million people. By then China’s population will have a demographic look similar to ultra-old Japan’s today — but without the affluence of its Asian neighbor.

    Other Asian countries have similar problems. Thailand ranks as the fifth most demographically challenged, with a projected population loss of 8%. The population of Sri Lanka, just across Adam’s Bridge from still fast-growing India, is projected to increase only 0.6%.

    Also going into a demographic stall is South Korea, another country which a generation ago worried about its expanding population. With its fertility rate well below replacement (1.3), the country will essentially stagnate over the next 35 years, and will becoming one of the most elderly nations on earth.

    Full List: The Countries Shrinking The Fastest

    Smaller Singapore is an anomaly. The city-state has a rock-bottom fertility rate of 1.2, but projects a population increase of 20% by 2050 due to its liberal and vigorously debated immigration policies.

    Economic Consequences

    Most world leaders are fixated on the unpredictable new administration in Washington in the short term, but they might do better to look at the more certain long-term impacts of diminishing populations on the world’s most important economies. Economists, including John Maynard Keynes, have connected low birth rates to economic declines. On the “devil” of overpopulation, Keynes wrote, “I only wish to warn you that the chaining up of the one devil may, if we are careless, only serve to loose another still fiercer and more intractable.”

    It is already fairly clear that lower birthrates and increased percentages of aged people have begun to slow economic growth in much of the high-income world, and can be expected to do the same in long ascendant countries such as China and South Korea. Economists estimate that China’s elderly population will increase 60% by 2020, even as the working-age population decreases by nearly 35%. This demographic decline, stems from the one-child policy as well as the higher costs and smaller homes that accompany urbanization, notes the American Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Eberstadt. China’s annual projected GDP growth rate will likely decline from an official 7.2% in 2013 to a maximum of 6% by 2020.

    There are several reasons these demographic shifts portend economic decline. First, a lack of young labor tends to drive up wages, sparking the movement of jobs to other places. This first happened in northern Europe and Japan will increasingly occur now in Korea, Taiwan, and even China. It also lowers the rate of innovation, notes economist Gary Becker, since change tends to come from younger workers and entrepreneurs. Japan’s long economic slowdown reflects, in part, the fact that its labor force has been declining since the 1990s and will be fully a third smaller by 2035.

    The second problem has to do with the percentage of retirees compared to active working people. In the past growing societies had many more people in the workforce than retirees. But now in societies such as Japan and Germany that ratio has declined. In 1990, there were 4.7 working age Germans per over 65 person. By 2050, this number is projected to decline to 1.7. In Japan the ratios are worse, dropping more than one-half, from 5.8 in 1990 to 2.3 today and 1.4 in 2050. China, Korea and other East Asian countries, many without well-developed retirement systems, face similar challenges.

    Finally, there is the issue of consumer markets. Aging populations tend to buy less than younger ones, particularly families. One reason countries like Japan and Germany can’t reignite economic growth is their slowing consumption of goods. This challenge will become all the more greater as China, the emerging economic superpower, also slows its consumption. The future of demand, critical to developing countries, could be deeply constrained.

    What about the USA?

    To a remarkable extent, the United States has avoided these pressing demographic issues. The U.N. has the U.S. tied with Canada for the fastest projected population growth rate of any developed country: a 21% expansion by 2050. Yet this forecast could prove inaccurate.

    One threat stems from millennials who, even with an improved economy, have not started families and had children at anything close to historical rates. Today the U.S. fertility rate has dropped to 1.9 from 2.0 before the Great Recession; population growth is now lower than at any time since the Depression. This places us below replacement level for the next generation. Projections for the next decade show a stagnant, and then falling number of high school graduates, something that should concern both employers and colleges. The United States’ high projected population growth rate, like that of Singapore, is entirely dependent upon maintaining high rates of immigration.

    But even before the election of Donald Trump, who is hell-bent on cracking down on at least undocumented immigration, total immigration to the United States has been slowing. At the same time the fertility rates of some immigrant groups, notably Latinos, have been dropping rapidly and approaching those of other Americans. This is despite the fact that as many as 40% of women would like to have more children; they simply lack the adequate housing, economic wherewithal and spousal support to make it happen.

    In the coming decades, the countries that can maintain an at least somewhat reasonable population growth rate, and enough younger people, will likely do best. To a large extent, it’s too late for that in much of Europe and East Asia. For countries like the United States, Canada and Australia, with among the most liberal immigration policies and large landmasses, the prospects may be far better. However, we also need native-born youngsters to launch, get married and start creating the next generation of Americans.

    This piece originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Photo: Ahmet Demirel [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

  • How Post-Familialism Will Shape the New Asia

    Surprisingly, the modern focal point for postfamilial urbanism comes from eastern Asia, where family traditionally exercised a powerful, even dominant influence over society. The shift toward post-familialism arose first in Japan, the region’s most economically and technologically advanced country. As early as the 1990s sociologist Muriel Jolivet unearthed a trend of growing hostility toward motherhood in her book Japan: The Childless Society? –a trend that stemmed in part from male reluctance to take responsibility for raising children.

    The trend has only accelerated since then. By 2010 a third of Japanese women entering their 30s were single, as were roughly one in five of those entering their 40s – that is roughly eight times the percentage seen in 1960 and twice that seen in 2000. By 2030, according to sociologist Mika Toyota, almost one in three Japanese males may be unmarried by age 50.

    In Japan, the direct tie between low birth rates and dense urbanization is most expressed in Tokyo, which now has a fertility rate of around one child per family, below the already depressed national average. Some of the lowest rates on earth can be seen elsewhere in eastern Asia, including those in Seoul, Singapore and Hong Kong, which are now roughly the same as the rate in Tokyo.

    As more of Asia becomes highly urbanized like Japan, this kind of ultra-low fertility will spread to other parts of the continent. Most critically, this dynamic has already spread to mainland China, or at least to its larger cities, where fertility rates have dropped well below 1.0. In 2013, Shanghai’s fertility rate of 0.7 was among the lowest ever reported – well below the “one child” mandate removed in 2015 and only one-third the rate required to simply replace the current population. Beijing and Tianjin suffer similarly dismal fertility rates.

    This pattern of low fertility, notes demographer Gavin Jones, suggests that rapid urbanization has already made the notion of the one-child policy antiquated. Now, even with fertility policies being loosened, many Chinese families are opting not to take advantage, largely due to the same reasons cited in other parts of the world: the high cost of living and high housing costs.

    Perhaps no city better reflects Asia’s emerging urban paradigm than Seoul, the densest of the high-income world’s megacities outside of Hong Kong. The Korean capital is more than 2.5 times as crowded as Tokyo, twice as dense as London and 5 times as crowded as New York. No surprise then that self-styled urban pundits love the place, as epitomized by a glowing report in Smithsonian magazine that painted Seoul as “the city of the future.” Architects, naturally, joined the chorus. In 2010 the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design named Seoul the “world design capital.”

    Ultimately, Seoul epitomizes the retro-urbanist fantasy: a city that is dense and dominating, rapidly turning the rest of the country into depopulating backwaters. Seoul has monopolized population growth in Korea, accounting for nearly 90% of total growth since 1970. Seoul also currently holds nearly 50% of the country’s population, up from 20% in 1960.

    Seoul’s development has come at the expense of not just its own hinterlands but also its own humanity. Its formerly human-scaled form of housing, known as a hanok , which was one story tall and featured an interior courtyard, has been largely replaced with tall, often repetitive towers that stretch even into the suburbs. While architects and planners celebrate this shift, they rarely consider whether this form of urbanization creates a good place for people, particularly families.

    When you consider the trends in similar cities, it’s unsurprising that Korean sociologists have noted the shift to high-density housing as being unsuitable for families with children.

    Over time the impact of these housing policies will be profound. By 2040 Korea’s population will join those of Japan and Germany as one of the world’s oldest. This will occur despite determined government efforts to encourage childbearing, efforts that may well be doomed by the government’s similar commitment to a dense, centralized urban form.

    What will happen to societies that are likely to retain extremely low rates of fertility? Japan, notes Canadian demographer Vaclav Smil, represents “an involuntary global pioneer of a new society.” Japan certainly exemplifies one way societies may evolve under diminishing birth rates.

    Projecting population and fertility rates is difficult, but the trajectory for Japan is unprecedented. The UN projects Japan’s 2100 population to be 91 million, down from 2015′s 127 million, but Japan’s own National Institute of Population & Social Security Research projects a population of 48 million, nearly 50% lower than the UN’s projection.

    Japan’s urban centralization both feeds and accelerates this trend. Rather than disperse, Japan’s population is “recentralizing.” A country with a great tradition of regional rivalries, home to an impressive archipelago of venerable cities, is becoming, in effect, a city-nation, with an increased concentration on just one massive urban agglomeration: Tokyo. This has, for the time being, allowed Tokyo to escape the worst of Japan’s demographic decline, drawing heavily on the countryside and smaller cities, both of which are losing population. From 2000 to 2013 the Tokyo metropolitan area added 2.4 million residents, while the rest of the nation declined by 2 million.

    Tokyo is now home to almost one in three Japanese. But its growth is likely to be constrained, as the last reservoir of rural and small-city residents seems certain to dry up dramatically. A projection for the core prefecture of Tokyo indicates a 50% population cut by 2100 to a number smaller than it was at the beginning of World War II; 46% of that reduced population will be over 65.

    This suggests it is time, in high-income countries at least, to shift our focus from concerns about overpopulation to a set of new and quite unique challenges presented by rapid aging and a steadily diminishing workforce. Even birth rates in developing countries are tumbling toward those of wealthy countries. As British environmental journalist Fred Pearce puts it, “the population bomb’ is being defused over the medium and long term.”

    Some, like Pearce, see the Japanese model as an exemplar of a world dominated by seniors – with very slow and even negative population growth – that will be “older, wiser, greener.” Following the adolescent ferment of the 20th century, Pearce looks forward to “the age of the old” that he claims “could be the salvation of the planet.”

    Yet, if the environmental benefits of a smaller, older and less consumptive population may be positive, there may be other negative ramifications of a rapidly aging society. For one thing, there will be increasingly fewer children to take care of elderly parents. This has led to a rising incidence of what the Japanese call kodokushi , or “lonely death,” among the aged, unmarried and childless. In Korea, Kyung-sook Shin’s highly praised bestseller, Please Look After Mom, which sold 2 million copies, focused on “filial guilt” in children who fail to look after their aging parents and hit a particular nerve in the highly competitive eastern Asian society that seems to be drifting from its familial roots.

    Additionally, an aging population will certainly diminish demand for both goods and services and likely would not promote a vibrant entrepreneurial economy.

    China will face its own version of “demographic winter,” although sometime later than Japan or the Asian Tiger states. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that China’s population will peak in 2026 and then will age faster than any country in the world besides Japan. Its rapid urbanization, expansion of education and rising housing costs all will contribute to this trend. China’s population of children and young workers between 15 and 19 will decline 20% from 2015 to 2050, while that of the world will increase nearly 10%.

    In China the consequences of the rising number of elderly will be profound. Demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, for example, sees the prospect of a fiscal crisis caused by an aging and ultimately diminishing population. China, he notes, faces “this coming tsunami of senior citizens” with a smaller workforce, greater pension obligations and generally slower economic growth.

    It seems likely, as has occurred in Japan already, that rising costs associated with an aging population, and a dearth of new workers and consumers, will hamper wealth creation and income growth. Societies dominated by the old likely will become inherently backward-looking, seeking to preserve the existing wealth of seniors as opposed to creating new opportunities for the increasingly politically marginalized younger population.

    The shift to an aging population also creates, particularly in Asia where urbanization is most rapid, the segregation of generations, with the elderly in rural areas and the younger people in cities. Around the world, the results of this shift are likely to resemble those seen in Japan, with cities becoming home to an ever expanding part of the population, while people in the countryside are destined to grow older and ever more isolated. It is not clear how the expanding senior population, which was traditionally cared for by younger generations, will fare with fewer children to support them and in the absence of a well-developed welfare state.

    Later this century these same challenges will even be felt in many parts of the developing world. In rapidly urbanizing, relatively poor countries such as Vietnam, the fertility rate is already below replacement levels, and it is rapidly declining in other poorer countries such as Myanmar, Indonesia and even Bangladesh. In parts of Latin America, especially Brazil, fertility rates are plunging to below those seen in the United States. Brazil’s birth rate (4.3 in the late 1970s and now 1.9) has dropped not only among the professional classes but also in the countryside and among those living in the favelas. As one account reports, women in Brazil now say, “Afábrica está fechada”–the factory is closed.

    Excerpted from The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us, by Joel Kotkin (B2 Books, 2016)

    This piece first appeared in Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

    Photo: John Gillespie, CC License

  • Is it Time for MagLev?

    Maryland officials have announced that a proposal to build a maglev line from Washington to Baltimore has received a commitment for the feasibility study of $2 million from Japanese government. This is in addition to a much larger involvement by the Japanese government, which would include a $5 billion commitment from the government Japan Bank for International Cooperation. The private Central Japan Railway Company has also agreed to waive any licensing fees for using its maglev technology.

    The loan would finance one-half of the “somewhat north of “$10 billion cost, as characterized by Northeast Maglev, the developer of the proposed system.

    Surely that is a far better alternative than digging deeper into U.S. taxpayer pockets if combined with sufficient private investment. Otherwise any such system could require huge federal grants, or low interest loans through the Federal Railroad Administration Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement (RRIF) loan guarantee program.  An RRIF loan could potentially expose taxpayers to a 100% loss, should the maglev system fail to pay for its capital and operating costs, as occurred with what the Washington Post characterized as the “Solyndra Scandal,” which cost taxpayers more than half a billion dollars due to a federal loan guarantee.

    The history of private investment in high speed rail around the world is considerably less than encouraging in this regard.

    What is Maglev?

    Maglev is magnetic levitation, a process by which magnetic forces are used to elevate and propel trains, without friction, at very high speed. The technology has long been favored by futurists and some transport professionals, but there is only one high-speed system in operation (Shanghai). That line has only been partially completed and the rest of the line has been suspended.

    “North of” Cost Estimates

    The evidence seems to be that the costs of maglev are “north of” high speed rail costs. This is of particular concern for taxpayers, since only two high speed rail lines of the many built in the world have “broken even.” There are recent reports that a third, Shanghai to Beijing is now making a profit Generally large rail project costs have been notoriously underestimated, as the Oxford University work led by Professor Bent Flyvbjerg has shown.

    As a result, there is always the risk that a venture proposed as commercial could run out of money during the construction phase, or generate insufficient revenues to its operating and capital costs. In either case, government subsidies would likely be sought by the operator.

     “North of” cost projections, such as suggested by Northeast Maglev, seem to be the rule in high speed rail, given that original cost projections for similar projects have been so routinely unreliable.

    The current $10 billion estimate for the Washington to Baltimore line is already well north of an earlier $8 billion estimate.

    The currently under construction Tokyo to Nagoya and later Osaka (Chuo Shinkansen maglev) has a construction cost in excess of ¥9 trillion (approximately $90 million). With 90 percent of the Tokyo to Nagoya section underground or in tunnels, cost escalation seems likely.

    Similarly, the cost of the California high-speed rail line, in its original full he high-speed configuration from Los Angeles San Francisco tripled (inflation adjusted)  to well “north of” its 1999 cost projection made. Officials cut the system back from full high-speed rail operation in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas to reduce costs to a more politically acceptable level.

    High Speed Maglev: The One Partial Line

    Currently, the only partial high-speed maglev line in the world takes passengers only two-thirds of the way from its Pudong International Airport terminus to central Shanghai.

    It was planned to extend the Shanghai maglev line to the center and eventually to Hangzhou, an urban area of 7.6 million residents approximately 180 kilometers (110 miles) to the southwest. However, those extensions have been suspended and high-speed rail service is now available to Hangzhou.

    The developers of the Shanghai maglev hoped that China would adopt the technology for its high-speed intercity rail system. China, however, opted for conventional high-speed rail technology and will soon be operating at speeds of up to 350 kilometers per hour (220 miles per hour), the fastest in the world. The train sets are already operating in Manchuria.

    A Real Head Scratcher

    Significantly, the long and disappointing startup pains of maglev may be coming to an end.

    The Central Japan Railway has begun building the Tokyo to Nagoya and eventually Osaka Chuo Shinkansen maglev line. The currently planned completion date for the Nagoya section is 2027, with a package of financial incentives worth and a ¥3 trillion loan from the Japanese government intended to advance the completion date for the new going to Osaka section from 2045 to 2037. Thus, Japanese taxpayers are already potentially “on the hook” financially.

    There’s an element of the bizarre here.  How much additional transport infrastructure is required in the nation that is losing population at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world? By the earliest date the Osaka extension opens (2037), Japan’s population will have fallen 14 million (more than 10 percent) from today, according to projections of the National Institute for Population and Social Security Research. A quarter of a century later (2062), the population will have dropped another 27 million, to 85 million. That is 10 million fewer people than the 95 million who lived in Japan when the first high speed rail line opened just before the 1964 Olympics. In 2089, Japan is projected to have only 58 million people, fewer than almost 170 years (Figure).

    One economic development report noted that the line would “help alleviate the population overcrowding concentration in the Tokyo metropolitan area. Yet, by 2110, the entire country is projected to have not many more people than the Tokyo metropolitan region today.  

    The Chuo Shinkansen maglev is a part of Prime Minister Abe’s financial stimulus program, which has both supporters and critics. The government talks of the economic development the line will induce. Others, such as Edwin Merner of Atlantis Investment Research called the maglev line a misallocation of resources and that passenger demand will be limited.

    The line has also been justified as a means to promote tourism. Yet, the average tourist may find the scenery — much of it very appealing — from the above ground 1 hour 40 minute ride to Nagoya or the 2 hour 30 minute to Osaka on the conventional high speed rail line more satisfying  (such as Mount Fuji) than the hundreds of miles of tunnel on the faster maglev line (Photo).


    By Alpsdake (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

    Protecting US and Northeastern Taxpayers

    But, back to the Washington to Baltimore maglev line. A privately financed and commercially viable maglev line would improve transportation in both the Washington to Baltimore corridor and the extension to New York. However, taxpayers need guarantees to ensure that they are not left “holding the bag.”

    For example, before any permits for proceeding are issued, the investors should be required to post a bond to ensure that the private funding will be sufficient to complete the system, thus avoiding public subsidy. Further, a performance bond should guarantee that no operating subsidies are required for at least a minimum number of years (perhaps 10 or 25).

    A Chance for Success?

    With sufficient taxpayer safeguards, there may be a chance for it to succeed. And surely, we wish Japan, the Japan Bank for International Development, the Central of Japan Railway and Northeast Maglev the best, hoping that they can provide a fully commercial venture. On the other hand, like Ford’s “Nucleon” nuclear powered automobile (proposed in the 1950s), the time for maglev may never come.

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Lead photo: Chuo Shinkansen maglev by Saruno Hirobano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30917648

  • Japan Census 2015: Decline Less than Projected

    Headlines were recently made recently as Japan finally experienced a long predicted official decline in population. This is widely expected to be the beginning of a long decline in population, which the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research has projected will drop Japan’s population from its present 127 million to 43 million by 2100 (Chart). This loss equals or exceeds the population of all but 15 of the world’s nearly 200 nations, including Germany, the United Kingdom and France.

    Population projections are, of course, not an exact science. They can be accurate, or they can “miss by a mile.” The preliminary 2015 census figures indicate that the population loss since 2010 has been considerably less than predicted. Japan lost 950,000 residents since between 2010 and 2015,The previous 5-year census period had shown a gain of 280,000. Losing nearly a million population is a big deal. But losing 1.5 million would have been an even bigger deal, as had been projected by Japan’s National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. Over the past five years, Japan’s population loss was more than one-third less than expected (35 percent).

    The big question is “why?” The most obvious answer is a combination of factors, such as   more births than projected or a falling death rate. The Japanese enjoy long lives. In 2013, there were more people aged 100 or above than in the United States, despite, Japan’s 60 percent lower population. More than one in eight of the world’s centenarians live in Japan, while only one in sixty of the world’s people is Japanese.

    No analysis has been identified, nor is the detailed age data for such an analysis readily available. This is to be expected this soon after publication of the first census results. However, recent media reports indicate a continuing annual decline in births. The difference could also be the result of problems in the projection methodology.

    Actual and Projected Population by Area

    As had been the case in the last census period (2005-2010) Tokyo was the big winner. Tokyo prefecture (note), which contains the 23 ku (cities) that constituted the city of Tokyo until its mid-1940s dissolution as well as suburbs, was expected to gain 190,000 residents, but added 355,000. Overall, the four-prefecture area of Tokyo-Yokohama, which includes Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama and Chiba prefectures added more than 500,000 residents, compared to the expected 275,000. The gain in Tokyo-Yokohama was 1.4 percent, nearly double the 0.8 percent expected.

    The other two megacities (over 10 million population) did not do so well. Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto (Osaka, Hyogo, Kyoto and Nara prefectures), which is larger than the Los Angeles-Riverside combined statistical area, lost 140,000 residents, nearly as many as the 164,000 projected. Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto was expected to lose 0.9 percent of its population, and nearly equaled that, at minus 0.8 percent.

    Nagoya, including the prefectures of Aichi, Mie and Gifu, lost 13,000 residents, two-thirds the 19,000 projected. Nagoya lost 0.1 percent of its population, slightly better than the minus 0.2 percent projected.

    The middle-sized metropolitan areas did better. The prefecture of Fukuoka, which includes the nation’s fourth largest metropolitan area, Fukuoka-Kitakyushu was expected to lose 0.5 percent of its population, Instead it managed a 0.5 percent gain. Hiroshima was expected to lose 1.2 percent of its population and lost only one-half that much (minus 0.6 percent).

    The city of Sapporo, in Hokkaido prefecture, was a big winner more than doubling its projected 1.0 percent increase (Note 2). Sapporo had a population gain of 2.1 percent. Most of the Sapporo metropolitan area is in the city of Sapporo, and unlike many core municipalities, there is still room for greenfield development.

    Sendai, in Miyagi prefecture was particularly hard hit by the great earthquake and tsunami of 2011. That makes Sendai’s population performance all the more impressive. Sendai was projected to suffer a population loss of 1.8 percent. Yet, its population loss was two thirds less, at 0.6 percent.

    The balance of the nation even did better than expected. Outside the metropolitan areas listed above (and the city of Sapporo), Japan was expected to lose 2.7 percent of its population. The loss was somewhat more modest, at 2.4 percent.

    Government Concern

    Despite the better news out of the census, the government is taking the longer term population loss very seriously. Its Committee for the Future indicates that the prospect could be: “…impose a great burden on people that offsets economic growth, threatening to decrease the actual per-capita consumption level, or the metric for the actual quality and level of people’s lives.”

    Even Tokyo, which has escaped the effects of population decline will be at risk, according to the Committee: The Tokyo Metropolitan area, while unable to avoid the effects of hyper-aging, will lose the vitality of a global city…”

    The changing demographics are already evident in a near majority single person household population in the core Tokyo prefecture. In 2010, 46 percent of Tokyo prefecture households are single person, compared to just 32 percent at the national level, and 36 percent in Osaka prefecture, which has the second highest percentage, according to National Institute of Population and Social Security Research data. Moreover, Tokyo prefecture’s average household size, at 2.03 in 2010, was the lowest, by far in the nation, and well below the national average of 2.42. Like many core areas in the largest metropolitan areas around the world, Tokyo prefecture, less than the normal proportion of children is to be found.

    The government has established a goal of increasing the fertility rate from the present 1.4 (children per woman of child-bearing age) to 1.80 by 2030 and 2.07 by 2040. This would mean a population of 102 million in 2060, compared to the 87 million that current trends suggest. This would also eventually stabilize at around 90 million, more than double the presently projected figure of 43 million.

    Proposed government strategies have involved an array from expanding the use of paternity leave, making it easier for women to retain their jobs after childbirth, supporting better job security for younger people and extending to “support for matchmaking efforts by municipalities and local chambers of commerce.”

    More recently, the government has even hinted at encouraging immigration, which is a radical proposal for a nation that has generally not been welcoming of a large influx of foreigners: “In February 2014, the Cabinet Office revealed that Japan will likely only be able to maintain a population of more than 100 million if it accepts 200,000 immigrants annually from 2015 and the total fertility rate recovers to 2.07 by 2030.”

    There is much riding on Japan’s effort to halt or at least slow the decline of its  population. Other  nations, especially across East Asia and Europe, face similar difficulties, so Japan’s success or failure (and the latter seems more likely) could materially impact policies elsewhere in the decades to come.

    Note 1: Tokyo prefecture is officially called the Tokyo metropolis, which has led many, including some researchers to imagine it to be the metropolitan area. It is simply a jurisdiction within a metropolitan area more than three times as large.

    Note 2: The city of Sapporo is used, because Hokkaido prefecture is far too large to be a metropolitan area (labor market).

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international pubilc policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the “Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey” and author of “Demographia World Urban Areas” and “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.” He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Photo: Sapporo (by author)

  • China’s Navy: A Maritime Power?

    When China’s navy looks beyond its coastal waters, which it increasingly does, it sees a kind of Great Wall. The Chinese call this the “First Island Chain,” a line of islands, some small, others huge, extending from the Japan archipelago to the north, the Ryuku island chain past Taiwan, and the Philippines to the south. The waters within this arc are considered an integral part of China itself.

    Increasingly, China’s sailors are penetrating this barrier through various choke points to gain access to the broader Western Pacific Ocean. In late November, a large formation of Chinese long-range bombers and support craft passed through the gap between Okinawa and the island of Miyako, the so-called “Miyako Channel”.

    The Miyako Channel is strategically vital for China because it is one of the few international waterways through which the Chinese navy and air can access the Pacific Ocean without violating somebody’s space. It is also located close to the Japanese-controlled Senkaku islands which are also claimed by China.

    The first time a Chinese H-6K bomber passed through the channel was September, 2013; the first multi-plane formation to use this passageway was in May this year, and late this year an unusually large formation of eight bombers and support aircraft passed through the gap, flew around the Pacific, and then returned to home base through the channel.

    The H-6K is a modified and much improved version of an old Soviet Tu-22 bomber, known as a “Badger”. It has been configured to hold cruise missiles under its wings or in its bomb bay. The planes reportedly flew about 620 miles into the Pacific before returning to their home base near Shanghai.

    Both the Chinese navy and the air force are learning to conduct extended maritime operations far from home waters and into the wider Western Pacific. Of course, China has maintained a permanent, rotating flotilla of two destroyers and a supply ship in the waters off the coast of Somalia and the Gulf of Aden since 2009. Unlike Japan, it does not have a permanent base in that region, although it is seeking one.

    In March, 2014, two Chinese warships docked at Abu Dhabi, the first time a Chinese fleet had made a port call on the Arabian Peninsula since the days of the Treasure Ships of Admiral Zheng He. In 2013, the Chinese navy made its first goodwill visit to South America, and it stationed a guided missile frigate in the Mediterranean to help escort ships removing chemical weapons from Syria.

    These missions are not war fighting, but the ships have enhanced capabilities for operating in seas far from home. They have gained experience in coordinating with other naval services on anti-piracy patrol, and exercised with other navies, including those of South Korea and Pakistan.

    In the summer of 2013 a Chinese naval flotilla passed through the Soyu Strait, which separates Hokkaido from the southern tip of Russia’s Kurile islands; they returned to their home base through the Miyako Channel. The People’s Daily trumpeted this maneuver as if it were a major triumph. Never mind that these narrow waters are international passageways or that they could easily be closed off if the Japanese decided to do so.

    China routinely conducts naval and air exercises beyond the First Island Chain as far away as the Philippine Sea, and the number of Chinese naval flotillas passing through the First Island Chain has increased significantly in recent years. There were two in 2008 and 2009, four in 2010, five in 2011, and eleven in 2012. In 2012 surface combatants were deployed seven times to the Philippine Sea; they were deployed nineteen times in 2013. The Maneuver-5 exercise in the Philippine Sea involved units from all three of China’s fleets, its largest open-ocean exercise to date.

    The Chinese navy has now penetrated all of the Western Pacific choke points along the chain, from the Tsuruga Strait separating Hokkaido from Honshu in northern Japan to the Bashi Strait separating Taiwan from the Philippines and the Sunda Strait in Indonesia. In October, 2012 a flotilla exited the East China Sea through the narrow passage way between Taiwan and Japan’s Yonaguna island in the Ryukyu chain (where the Japanese army has constructed a surveillance radar).

    This is thought to have been a signal from Beijing of displeasure over Tokyo’s decision to buy the Senkaku islands a month earlier. Later, two Sovremnny Class destroyers and two frigates exited the chain through the Miyako Strait and returned via the waters separating Yonaguna from Taiwan.

    The navy has steadily progressed from a handful of vessels, to multi-fleet (i.e. elements from all three of China’s fleets), to combined operations with submarines, drones and long-range bombers. Not only does China maintain a permanent anti-piracy force in the Indian Ocean, it now routinely conducts naval exercises and operates beyond the First Island Chain, says the US National Defense University.

    This year China was invited to participate in the Rimpac exercise in waters near Hawaii. It sent a destroyer, but also an intelligence-gathering ship, making it possibly the first time a nation spied on an exercise in which it was a participant.

    When queried as to its purpose and intentions of these missions, Beijing has a standard reply: “The training is in line with the relevant international practices and is not aimed at any one country or target and poses no threat to any country or region.”

    In June, 2015, Beijing issued a white paper on its defense priorities in which it stated what has been obvious to any naval planner paying attention: that China’s naval interests are no longer limited to its coastline, but span the globe. “The traditional mentality [going back to Mao Zedong] that the land outweighs the seas must be abandoned,” the paper states.

    That the Chinese navy will enhance its capabilities for “open seas protection” just puts into words what is actually happening. The white paper leaves little doubt that China is intent on transforming itself into a modern maritime power, capable of challenging Japan or the US in Asia and elsewhere.

    Todd Crowell is the author of The Coming War, published by Amazon as a Kindle Single.

    First Island Chain (perimeter marked in red) map by Suid-Afrikaanse (GFDL) via Wikimedia Commons

  • Peak People in Japan

    Japan reached "peak people" in 2011, when its population reached 127.4 million residents. From that point, all trends point to significant population losses. But, there is by no means unanimity on the extent of those population losses. Population projection is anything but an exact science, and Japan provides perhaps the ultimate example.

    Dueling National Population Projections

    Japan’s agency responsible for projecting population, the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research forecasts a stunning reduction of population to only 42.9 million residents in 2110. For every three Japanese residents today, there will be one in 2110 according to the National Institute of Population. If this projection is realized, Japan’s population would drop to a level not seen since the middle 1890s.

    The National Institute of Population projects a population loss to 97.0 million residents by 2050, for an annual population loss rate of 0.7 percent from 2015. By 2100, the population would fall to 49.6 million, for an annual loss rate of 1.3 percent. Over the 95 years from 2015, the annual population loss rate would accelerate from 0.4 percent annually to nearly 1.5 percent.

    The United Nations is considerably more optimistic about Japan’s future population than the National Institute of Population. The UN forecasts a population of 108.3 million residents by 2050, or 11 million more residents than expected by the National Institute of Population. The annual loss rate is 0.4 percent, one half the rate projected by the National Institute of Population. By 2100, the last year of the UN series, the population would be 84.5 million, 35 million more than the National Institute of Population figure. The UN’s annual population loss rate would be 0.8 percent (Figure 1).

    Major Metropolitan Areas

    Much of Japan’s urban population is in the dense corridor from Tokyo-Yokohama to Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto, a distance of approximately 300 miles (500 kilometers). The four metropolitan areas of this corridor (Tokyo-Yokohama, Shizuoka-Hamamatsu, Nagoya, and Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto) contain approximately 75 million residents. By comparison, the US Northeast Corridor is about 1.5 times as long and has under 50 million residents.

    According to National Institute of Population data, each of the 10 largest metropolitan has reached its population peak. The most populous, Tokyo-Yokohama is the only major metropolitan area to have gained population between 2010 and 2015. Each of the others had already reached their population peaks, according to the forecasts that end in 2040 (Figure 2).

    Tokyo-Yokohama:Tokyo-Yokohama is the world’s largest metropolitan area (labor market area). Much of it is located on the Kanto plain that stretches in three directions from Tokyo Bay. Between 2010 and 2015, Tokyo-Yokohama grew from a population of 42.6 million to 42.8 million. However a strong turnaround is anticipated. By 2020, the population is expected to fall to 42.4 million. Tokyo-Yokohama is expected to decline to 38.0 million residents in 2040, a reduction approximately equal to the population of metropolitan areas such as Phoenix, Montréal, and Melbourne. The 2040 population would represent a loss of approximately 11 percent from 2015.

    Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto: Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto has been Japan’s second largest metropolitan area for decades. Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto is a true conurbation, with three separate core cities and their suburbs that have grown together to form a single urban area, which now also encompasses smaller Nara, the country’s ancient capital. Some of Japan’s most important historical sites are in Kyoto and Nara. Despite having less than one half the population of Tokyo-Yokohama, Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto has been one of the world’s largest metropolitan areas for at least the last half of the century. Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto’s population fell from 20.9 million in 2010 to 20.7 million in 2015. By 2040, this large urban agglomeration is forecast to have a population of 17.5 million, down 16 percent from its 2015 level.

    Nagoya: Nagoya is Japan’s third largest metropolitan area and is located about two thirds of the way between Tokyo-Yokohama and Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto. Nagoya is renowned as the headquarters of Toyota. Nagoya is expected to fall from its 11.3 million residents in 2015 to 11.2 million in 2020 and 10.0 million in 2040. This population loss rate would be similar to that of Tokyo-Yokohama, at approximately 11 percent.

    Fukuoka-Kitakyushu: The Fukuoka-Kitakyushu metropolitan area is comprised of two large and separate urban areas. It is the only metropolitan area of the largest five that is not in the Tokyo to Osaka corridor. Further, Fukuoka-Kitakyushu is on the island of Kyushu, to the south of the main island of   Honshu. Fukuoka-Kitakyushu had a population of 5.0 million in 2015 and is expected to fall to 4.4 million in 2040. This is an approximately 12 percent population loss rate, somewhat worse than Tokyo-Yokohama and Nagoya.

    Shizuoka-Hamamatsu:The Shizuoka-Hamamatsu metropolitan area is located between the Tokyo-Yokohama and Nagoya metropolitan areas. In 2015, the population was 3.7 million, which is expected to drop to 3.0 million in 2040. This area, long a critical part of Japan’s industrial complex, would suffer the largest loss among the five largest metropolitan areas, at 18 percent.

    The Rest of Japan: The balance of Japan would experience an even greater loss, dropping from 43 million in 2015 to 34 million in 2040. This would represent a decline of 20 percent.

    Japan: Leading the Way?

    Japan is just the first of a wave of nations that are expected to experience population declines. The challenges are likely to be great as the nation is forced to downsize its considerable infrastructure to accommodate a smaller population. With a growing imbalance of senior citizens relative to working age adults, there are likely to be significant difficulties in financing social services. Japan’s strategies and successes or failures will be watched closely by national leaders from Berlin to Beijing and Brasilia whose nations  are likely to experience reductions in population and demographic imbalances starting mid-century or sooner.

    Wendell Cox is Chair, Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California) and principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm.
    He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Photo: Fukuoka (by author)

  • Can Abe Tackle The Real Reason For Japan’s Decline? (Procreation)

    Much has been made of Japan’s latest relapse into recession. For the most part, economists have focused on the efficacy of the once much-ballyhooed “Abenomics,” the stimulus and structural reform program that was seen as the key to turning around the island nation’s torpid economy.

    While Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling coalition won a sweeping electoral victory this weekend, giving him a mandate to continue his economic policies, it is increasingly clear that the epicenter of Japan’s crisis is not its Parliament, or the factory floor, but in the bedroom. Japan has been on a procreation holiday for almost a generation now, with one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet. The damage may prove impossible to overcome.

    Japan’s working-age population (15-64) peaked in 1995, while the United States’ has grown 21% since then. The projections for Japan are alarming: its working-age population will drop from 79 million today to less than 52 million in 2050, according to the Stanford Institute on Longevity.

    Since hitting a peak of 128 million in 2010, Japan’s overall population has dropped three years in a row.

    These trends all but guarantee the long-term decline of the Japanese economy and its society. In comparison, competitors such as the United States and India are projected to continue to grow their workforces over the long term. China’s workforce, which grew rapidly over the last couple of decades, recently began to decline, as early as 2010 by one estimate, due to its one-child policy.

    Some countries, like Germany or Singapore, have tried to make up for low fertility through immigration, something that remains all but unthinkable in congenitally insular Japan. Short-term importation of workers has occurred through a “foreign trainee” program, but it has stirred controversy, with some immigrant workers claiming they are being cheated and abused.

    Aging is becoming a bigger issue, particularly due to the country’s average lifespan of 83 years, which is among the longest in the world. Perhaps if everyone would have the good sense, as one Japanese official put it, to “hurry up and die,” the shrinkage would be manageable.

    But old Japanese don’t seem to be lining up to commit suicide. So by 2020, adult diapers are projected to outsell the infant kind. By 2040, the country will have more people over 80 than under 15, according to U.N. projections. By 2060, the number of Japanese is expected to fall from 127 million today to about 87 million, of whom almost 40% will be 65 or older.

    The fiscal costs are obvious. Over the past few decades, aging has helped transform once thrifty Japan into the country with the high-income world’s highest level of government debt. The demands for more help for the elderly, notably medical care, combined with a shrinking, increasingly occasional workforce, is one reason why Abe was forced to push for a sales tax increase, one of the things that retarded Japan’s recovery.

    These trends have been developing for decades. Sociologist Muriel Jolivet noted in her 1997 work Japan: The Childless Society that many Japanese women had taken a break from motherhood, in part due to male reluctance to take responsibility for raising children. This trend accelerated in the next decade. By 2010, a third of Japanese women entering their 30s were single, as were roughly one in five of those entering their 40s. That’s roughly eight times the percentage in 1960, and twice that of 2000. By 2030, according to sociologist Mika Toyota, almost one in three Japanese males may be unmarried by age 50.

    Many young Japanese are not only eschewing marriage but a highly publicized sliver now show little sexual interest in each other. The percentage of sexually active female university students, according to the Japanese Association for Sex Education, has fallen from a high of 60% in 2005 to 47% in 2012.

    Much has been made of a subset of young Japanese men labeled as “herbivores,” who appear more interested in comics, computer games and socializing through the Internet than in seeking out the opposite sex.  And since many only work part-time, they tend to stay longer with their parents, further slowing economic growth.

    No society can thrive under such an environment, certainly not in the long run. If “animal spirits” drive entrepreneurial growth — as it did unmistakably in Japan both before and after the Second World War — those are clearly dissipating now. As prices have dropped and opportunities shriveled, fewer Japanese are interested in starting or growing families.

    In the longer run, one has to wonder what kind of country Japan may become over time, something hardly irrelevant not only due to the country’s importance, but also since other key Asian countries appear to be following the demographic path it is blazing, including including South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and China. In China, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates, the population will peak in 2026, and will then age faster than any country in the world besides Japan.

    Of course, projecting population and fertility rates over the long run is difficult, and there remains a large margin for error. For example, the U.N. projects Japan’s 2100 population at 91 million, while Japan’s National Institute of Population and Social Security Research projects a population of 48 million, nearly one-half lower.

    Japan’s grim demography is also leading to tragic ends for some elderly. With fewer children to take care of elderly parents, there has been a rising incidence of what the Japanese call kodokushi, or “lonely deaths” among the aged, unmarried, and childless. Given the current trends, this can only become more commonplace over time.

    The Japanese “model” of low fertility still has its defenders, including those in the U.S. who point out that it allows, in the short term, for greater per capita wealth and lower carbon emissions. But most Japanese recognize that the profound morbidity of the demographic trends; 87% see an aging population as a major problem, according to a recent Pew study, compared to 57% in China and only 26% in the U.S.

    And to be sure, Japan remains a supremely civilized country, with low crime rates, a brilliant artisanal tradition, and exemplary infrastructure.But none of this can likely survive under these demographic conditions. Not surprisingly, the  Japanese government, like its counterparts in western Europe and Singapore, has attempted tomake child-rearing easier by providing cash payments for families and expanding child care.

    Yet to date, such compensation has been unable to make up for high housing costs and weaker familial bonds. As Toru Suzuki, senior researcher at the National Institute of Population and Society Security Research, put it in The Japan Times, “Under the social and economic systems of developed countries, the cost of a child outweighs the child’s usefulness.”

    Although the United States has not embarked on such a dismal course, in large part due to a greater land mass, lower housing prices and immigration, for us, too, the twin forces of lower fertility and the retirement of baby boomers is slowing our labor force growth rate.

    Ideally American fertility rates will recover with the economy, allowing us to get back to a more sustainable demography that would at least replace older people with a steady supply of young adults. What we don’t want to do is emulate Japan. There’s a price to pay for avoiding the bedroom in favor of video games, not only for individuals but societies as well.

    This piece first appeared at Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    Photo by Kevin Poh: Night Life @ Shinjuku, Tokyo

  • China’s Ascent in World Transport

    After years of closing the gap with the United States, China built enough freeways in 2013 to amass the greatest length of freeways in the world. Between 2003 and 2013, China expanded its national expressway system, with interstate (motorway in Europe) standard roadways from 30,000 to 105,000 kilometers (18,000 to 65,000 miles). This compares to the 101,000 kilometers (63,000 miles) in the United States in 2012. China’s freeway system is also longer than that of the European Union, which was 70,000 kilometers in 2010 (43,000 miles) and Japan (8,000 kilometers or 5,000 miles) as is indicated in Figure 1 (Note 1). The ascent of China is evident across the spectrum of transport data, both passenger and freight.

    A review of transport statistics in the four largest world economies (nominal gross domestic product) shows considerable variation in both passenger and freight flows. It also reflects the rapid growth of China. Generally comparable and complete data is available for the European Union, the United States, China and Japan.

    Passenger Travel

    All four of the world’s largest economies rely principally on roads for their passenger transport. The United States continues to lead in road volume (in passenger kilometers, see Note 2) by a substantial margin, followed by the European Union. In the United States, automobiles account for 83 percent of domestic passenger travel, which compares to 76 percent in the European Union and 58 percent in Japan. China’s combines automobile and bus data, which makes it impossible to obtain automobile comparisons with the other three economies.

    Road travel increased more than 150 percent between 2003 and 2013 in China. Yet roads have barely held their market share as China has built new world-class airports, such as Capital City in Beijing, Baiyun in Guangzhou and many others. Over the same 10 years air travel has increased 350 percent. Meanwhile, China has built the world’s most extensive high-speed rail system and has experienced healthy rail travel growth. Yet, despite this, passenger rail’s market share has dropped from 35 percent to 29 percent over the period (Figure 2).

    China is dominant among the four economies in passenger rail volumes, with its 1.05 trillion annual passenger kilometers (0.65 trillion passenger miles) accounting for more than 2.5 times the rail travel in both the European Union and Japan. US rail travel is no more than 1/20th that of China (equal to the road travel volume in the state of Arkansas).

    The United States continues to lead in a domestic airline travel, with a volume approximately 60 percent greater than those of the European Union and China. China trails the European Union by only two percent and with its growth rate seems likely to assume the second position before long (Figure 3).

    Passenger travel market shares are indicated in Figure 4.

    Freight Transport

    After having led the world in rail freight volumes in recent decades, the United States has recently yielded the title to China. In 2013, China moved nearly 3 trillion tonne kilometers (Note 3) of freight by rail, compared to the US total of 2.5 trillion (2012). It may be surprising to find out that Europe, with its extensive passenger train system moves so little of its freight by rail. However, the European Union moved approximately 60 percent less of its freight by rail. However, much of the capacity of the EU’s rail system is consumed by passenger trains, leaving little for freight.  This is despite a policy commitment in the EU to substantially increase the rail freight market share relative to trucks. As a result, in Europe, the freight trains are "on the highway" (see Photo below). China has been uniquely successful among the world’s economies in developing both a world class freight rail system and a world class passenger rail system. One of China’s early objectives in developing its high speed rail program was to free space for its large freight train volumes.


    Caption: Trucks on the A7, north of Barcelona (by author)

    Among other nations, only Russia can compete with China and the United States in rail freight, having moved approximately 2.2 trillion tonne kilometers in 2012.

    Rail freight remains by far the most important in the United States compared to the other three largest economies. Rail freight continues to carry more tonne kilometers in the United States than trucks. The situation is much different in Europe, where trucks carried four times the volume of freight rail. Rail freight is even less significant in Japan, where trucks carry more than 15 times the volume of rail freight.

    One possibly surprising fact lies with the substantial increase in China’s truck volumes over the last decade. China now has a volume of truck traffic that is four times that of trucks in either the European Union or the United States.

    In 2003, trucks carried 60 percent less of the nation’s metric tonne mileage than freight rail. By 2013, that had been reversed with tracks carrying 130 percent more volume than freight rail.

    However China’s dominance is even greater in water borne freight, at nearly 6 times the European Union volume and more than 10 times the volume of the United States (Figure 5). Even so, China’s largest freight volumes are carried on waterways, such as the Yangtze River. Over the past 10 years waterway volumes tripled. It is even expected that there will be a significant increase in shipping on the ancient Grand Canal (Figure 6).

    Freight market shares among the major modes are shown in Figure 7.

    India

    Another of the world’s largest economies, India, also relies heavily on roads. According to the World Bank 65 percent of the freight and nearly 90 percent of passengers are carried by roads in India, though late detailed data is not available. Yet India also has the largest passenger rail usage in the world. Only China is close, and the two nations have been near equal, at least over the last decade. In 2003, China trailed India by seven percent in passenger kilometers by train. Complete Indian Railway data for 2013 is not yet available. However, if the average trip length in 2013 was the same as in 2012, China will have moved to within two percent of India’s passenger rail volume. Both nations are far above Japan and the European Union, ranked third and fourth, and almost 90 percent above Russia, which has a reputation for high passenger rail volumes.

    The Future

    With economic growth in China slowing (though still at rates that would satisfy virtually any other nation) its transport growth of the past decade seems likely to moderate. On the other hand, the other large emerging economy, India, which has substantially trailed China, could assume a Chinese trajectory. The newly elected Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government is committed to economic advance and infrastructure development. Market facilitating policies like those that have propelled China (see the late Noble Laureate Ronald Coase and Ning Wang, How China Became Capitalist), could lead to a similar story about India in a decade or two.

    ——

    Note 1: The latest data on international transport varies by year, even within nations (such as the United States). This analysis compares the latest data, which is 2012 (Europe and Japan), 2013 (China) and the United States (2011, with some 2009). This latest years available permit comparing the general scale of differences and, particularly in the United States, changes from the earlier data are likely to have been modest, as a result of the Great Financial Crisis and the great economic malaise that has followed. The principal data sources are the Bureau of Transportation Statistics in the United States, the National Bureau of Statistics in China and Eurostat for the European Union and Japan.

    Note 2: A passenger kilometer (or passenger mile) is the distance traveled times the number of passengers. Thus, a car going 5 kilometers with one passenger produces 5 passenger kilometers. With two passengers, there are 10 passenger kilometers.

    Note 3: A tonne kilometer is a metric tonne (2.204 pounds or 1,000 kilograms) of freight times the number of kilometers traveled. The US ton (short ton) has 2,000 pounds or 907 kilograms.

    —-

    Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He was appointed to the Amtrak Reform Council to fill the unexpired term of Governor Christine Todd Whitman and has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

    Photograph: Grand Canal in Suzhou (by author)

  • Can Kamaishi, Japan Recover From the Tsunami?

    KAMAISHI, Japan – Two years after the disastrous 2011 earthquake and tsunami, most of the debris from the deluge has been cleared away in this small city on the northern edge of Japan’s tsunami coast. The cars and vans once piled on top of each other like some kind of apocalyptic traffic jam have been sorted out or sold for scrap. My guide, a local teacher who lost three of her aunts in the deluge, drives us up to a lookout. Spread out below us is the coastal village of Unosumai, or, more accurately, what once was the village of Unosumai. The view reminds me of pictures taken of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb had flattened almost everything. The only exception there was one surviving building, the former Industrial Promotion Hall in Hiroshima’s Peace Garden.

    In Unosumai, the village hall is still standing, broken windows and all, with the huge clock over the main entrance still fixed forever on 3:25 p.m., the time on March 11 of 2011 when an enormous wall of water washed into the building, drowning many of the village workers. A small shrine with flowers is set in front. While we stopped there, several people arrive to pray and give obeisance.

    Kamaishi is a hilly city with little flat land. Rising directly behind the central business district are three steep hills, covered with a network of wooden ladders, stairways and pathways that have long provided a natural shelter against tsunami, a kind of local version of the storm shelters in Oklahoma. Tsunami is an historic threat here in the same way that deadly tornadoes are there.

    These routes upward were critical in saving many lives. The town is extremely proud that not one of the approximately 3,000 elementary through high school children was killed in the surge, even though their schools, located along the shore, were inundated. It is often called the “Kamaishi Miracle.” By all accounts, the teachers and students performed admirably in the thirty minutes or so between the earthquake and the tsunami. Teachers had the presence of mind to tell their charges to literally ‘take to the hills’. Don’t wait. Older students carried the younger elementary school children on their backs as they climbed to safety.

    Kamaishi was famous for its network of seawalls, built at considerable expense before the tsunami. The seawalls utterly failed to hold back the surging tide. Plans to rebuild or strengthen them, using money from the national reconstruction fund, have become a source of controversy. Why spend so much money on a system that demonstrably failed its ultimate test?

    Some argue that the sea walls gave the residents a false sense of security. “I do believe that, unconsciously, the breakwater’s presence did give people a false sense of security,” says Mayor Takenori Noda. Loud speakers all over the city had warned people to flee, with enough time to get to higher ground. Most of the town is within about two hundred yards of the nearest evacuation stairway.

    Today, there isn’t much evidence of new construction going on. The national government has appropriated billions of yen to facilitate rebuilding in the tsunami-devastated zone, but not much is being spent in this town. When the slate is wiped totally clean, it is not surprising that it takes time to decide what to write as a replacement.

    Kamaishi and other Japanese towns along the northeastern tsunami coast need something more basic than millions of yen in reconstruction aid sunk into greater seawalls, namely, a rationale for their existence. For more than a hundred years, the city’s reason for being was grounded on its famous Steel Works.

    The location of Japan’s first steel mill blast furnace, Kamaishi started to rise even before the Meiji Restoration began Japan’s transformation into a modern, industrial society. Built in 1857, the furnace was initially established to provide the steel needed for modern artillery to defend the country.

    The city’s heyday was probably in the 1950 and 1960s, when some 12,000 people were employed by the mill, and the town had a population or more than 90,000. Nippon Steel closed the works in 1988, putting thousands out of work. The town’s population has steadily declined, and is now around 40,000.

    Kamaishi Steel Works never found a niche to justify itself, unlike Japan Steel Works a little further north on the island of Hokkaido. It, too, supplied the steel needed to build the large guns for the Imperial Japanese Navy, but it then evolved into a lucrative niche business to forge reactor pressure vessels for nuclear power plants, which it developed into virtually a global monopoly.

    Kamaishi struggled to find a substitute for defense production. It recruited various metal-working enterprises. Some stayed, but others left because the location was too far from regular supply networks. The small harbor was thought to have container-ship potential, but it never developed into the kind of terminal that some of the city fathers had envisioned. The day I visited it was quiet and empty of ships.

    In 2010, Foreign Policy Magazine used Kamaishi as an exemplar of what it thought ailed Japan’s economy, especially the propensity to spend billions of yen on unneeded and ultimately useless public works projects, including Kamaishi’s famous city breakwater.

    Has Kamaishi’s story changed since then? One element of the town’s new reconstruction plan involves a request for funds to build a rugby stadium. With the once formidable Kamaishi Nippon Steel Rugby team long gone, one has to wonder who would play there.

    Todd Crowell is a Tokyo-based journalist.

    Flickr photo by Master Sgt. Jeremy Lock, 1st Combat Camera Squadron 1. Posted by DVIDSHUB: “Petzel, a search and rescue dog with the Fairfax County, Va., Task Force 1 Urban Search and Rescue team waits for his master before heading out to search structures and debris on March 17, 2011, in Unosumai, Japan. A 9.0 earthquake hit Japan on March 11 that caused a tsunami that destroyed anything in its path.” Related Photos: dvidshub.net/r/sojri7.

  • Tokyo: Population Swan Dive Predicted

    In a recent Evolving Urban Form article, we speculated that Tokyo, the world’s largest urban area (population more than 35 million) could be displaced by fast-growing Jakarta or Delhi as early as 2030. If the prediction of central jurisdiction administrators and academics come true, Tokyo could be passed by many other urban areas in population by 2100.

    The Japan Times reports forecasts that the population of the Prefecture of Tokyo, the central jurisdiction of the metropolitan area, could decline by nearly 50 percent (chart) between 2010 and 2100 (Note). Yet, while the overall population is dropping in half, the elderly population would increase by more than 20 percent. The resulting far less favorable ratio of elderly to the working population would present unprecedented social and economic challenges.

    The article provides no information on the population of the entire urban area in 2100. The Prefecture of Tokyo constitutes somewhat over one third of the present population of the urban area.

    During the last census period (between 2005 2010) the four prefecture Tokyo metropolitan area (Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama and Chiba), gained approximately 1,100,000 new residents, while the balance of the country was losing 1,400,000 residents. Japan is forecast to suffer substantial population losses in the decades to come. The United Nations forecasts that its population will decline from approximately 125 million in 2010 to 90 million in 2100. This is the optimistic scenario. The National Institute of Population and Social Security Research forecasts a drop to under 50 million, a more than 60 percent population reduction.

    There are serious concerns about the projected population decline. According to the Japan Times, the researchers said that " … it will be crucial to take measures to turn around the falling birthrate and enhance social security measures for the elderly,"  A professor the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, expressed concern that "If the economies of developing countries continue growing, the international competitiveness of major companies in Tokyo will dive."

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    Note: the Prefecture of Tokyo government is called the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. This term can mislead, because the prefecture itself is not the metropolitan area, but only part of the four prefecture metropolitan area. The pre-– amalgamation predecessor of the current city of Toronto was called the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto. Like the Prefecture of Tokyo, the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto comprised only part of the Toronto metropolitan area. Confusion over these terms not only resulted in incorrect press reports, but even misled some academic researchers to treat these sub-metropolitan jurisdictions as metropolitan areas.