In your country, have you noticed in recent years that you see fewer children than before?
Parks, routes to school, the streets near home: everyday scenes differ from one country to another and from one place to another. How people perceive such changes varies from person to person, and population statistics alone cannot tell us whether the chances of seeing children have really changed.
In Japan, too, people have been hearing the word “aging” (population aging) in the news in recent years.
Japan is a country made up of four main islands—Honshu, Hokkaido, Shikoku and Kyushu—and many smaller islands. It has 47 prefectures, and in this article they are grouped into nine regions defined for this article.
What kinds of changes are taking place across Japan’s regions?
This time, I mapped the aging rate for 2015 and 2020 using Japan’s Population Census. The aging rate is the share of people aged 65 or older among the population whose age is known. The map shows differences between municipalities, that is, cities, wards, towns and villages.
Picture your own country as you go, and let’s look at Japan’s regions on the map.
Aging Rate Map of Japan
On the map, you can switch between 2015 and 2020 and check the aging rate of each municipality. If you select a point that interests you, the population aged 65 or older and the population with known age are shown as well.
Comparing the Aging Rate in Japan and the Nine Regions
Open “Show supplementary data” to see the population aged 65 or older and the population with known age for each year.
What I Noticed While Making the Map
Switching between 2015 and 2020 showed that the aging rate rose across Japan.
In 2020, 28.7% of the population with known age—nearly three in ten people—was aged 65 or older.
Even within Japan, aging rates and the way they changed differ from one municipality to another.
Think about your own country and the place where you live. And why not look for an area of Japan that interests you?
Source: Statistics Bureau of Japan (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications), “Population Census” (statistical table code 00200521; 2015 and 2020), obtained through the Statistics Dashboard API and aggregated and processed by Visible World by Data (data checked on September 24, 2026).
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※ The aging rate is calculated by dividing the population aged 65 or older by the population with known age. People whose age is not stated are not included in the calculation.
※ The regional divisions are specific to this article. Mie Prefecture is included in Chubu and Hokuriku, and Kinki consists of the six prefectures of Shiga, Kyoto, Osaka, Hyogo, Nara and Wakayama.
※ The aging rate of a region as a whole is not a simple average of the aging rates of its municipalities. It is calculated by dividing the total population aged 65 or older in the region by the total population with known age in the region.
※ The population with known age is the number of people whose age is stated; people whose age is not stated are excluded. Changes in it therefore do not match changes in the total population.
※ If you compare these figures with statistics from your own country, check whether the definitions of the denominator and age categories are the same—for example, whether the population aged 65 or older is divided by the total population or by the population with known age. If the definitions differ, compare trends rather than rankings.
※ The colors on the map are based on the values at locations such as municipal offices and show trends by smoothly connecting the surrounding values. They are not a map in which each administrative area is colored separately.
※ Representative points use the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism’s National Land Numerical Information “Municipal Offices and Public Facilities Data P05-22 (2022),” processed for this map. The common base map is reprocessed for this map from SMRI’s “japan-topography,” which is based on the Ministry’s National Land Numerical Information (administrative area data).
※ Some municipalities in Fukushima Prefecture have no values in some years. In 2015, six municipalities are shown as “no value”; in 2020, only Futaba is shown that way.
※ The 2015–2020 comparison alone cannot establish the cause of any change.
※ The basic tabulation of population and households of the 2025 Population Census was published on September 29, 2026, but it has not yet been reflected in this article’s map.
※ Displayed percentages are rounded. Because changes are calculated from unrounded values, they may differ by 0.1 percentage point from the result of subtracting the percentages shown on screen.
This service uses the API function of the Statistics Dashboard, but the content of this service is not guaranteed by the Government of Japan.