In 2025, close to 30 per cent of Japan’s population was aged 65 years or older while the country’s total fertility rate was 1.14, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. These demographic shifts have intensified discussion about who bears the costs of ageing and which generations have benefited most from Japan’s postwar economic and social order.
Prevailing narratives juxtapose the career stability and wage growth of those born in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War with the economic insecurity of those entering the workforce after the collapse of the 1990s. Generational labels such as ‘baby boomers’ are used to explain this dramatic shift in fortunes. Yet these labels run the risk of reducing inequalities produced by employment, gender, location and other factors to a simplistic conflict between age groups.
Some of Japan’s postwar generational cohorts were arguably ‘lucky’. The so-called baby boomers (dankai no sedai) born in the years immediately after the war, roughly 1947 to 1949, entered the labour market from the late 1960s into the early 1970s amid Japan’s high-speed economic growth. Many Japanese — especially men entering regular employment in large companies or the public sector — enjoyed secure employment, rising wages and expanding social protection. Labels such as the new breed (shinjinrui) and the bubble generation portrayed young Japanese as carefree beneficiaries of affluence for whom conspicuous consumption was apparently a rite of passage.
