Why Japan Is The Perfect Place To Turn 50

A significant birthday feels less so in a country that has become a global pioneer of ageing – for better and for worse.

- Leo Lewis

So. A big, round-numbered and menacing birthday coming up in a few weeks. Not to give too much away, but in the month I was born, Momoe Yamaguchi's Fuyu no Iro was electrifying the charts, Terror Of Mechagodzilla was about to hit cinemas and Okinawa was busying itself with last-minute preparations for Expo '75.

There are various ways to put this sombre milestone in context. I am a year younger than Hello Kitty, a decade younger than the Shinkansen bullet train and 100,000 years younger than Mount Fuji. All of those are still going strong, I suppose, although none are troubled by high cholesterol, resting-rate ruefulness or the ever-louder clicking from the mileometer of missed opportunities.

But then I remember, more cheerfully, that this birthday will be taking place in creaking, ageing Japan – a land where grey is the new black, lumbago is the new "Lambada" and 50 is not only the new 20, but more or less the median age.

Japan's candle-at-both-ends demographics put it on the global front line of both care home citizenship and youth-erosion. In a crisis now simply referred to by both the public and private sector as "the 2025 problem", the giant, eight million-strong generation of postwar baby boomers born between 1947 and 1949 have moved from the category of merely "elderly" to "advanced elderly".