The Chūgoku region is located in western Honshu, Japan.
Here, “Chūgoku” (中国地方) is not the name of the country China, but the name of a region of Japan made up of Tottori, Shimane, Okayama, Hiroshima and Yamaguchi prefectures.
Facing both the Sea of Japan and the Seto Inland Sea, the region offers a great variety of landscapes: coastal cities and towns, settlements surrounded by the Chūgoku Mountains, and countryside.
Parks, routes to school, shopping streets, fields and farmland, seashores: everyday scenes vary from area to area. Some people feel they see children less often than before, but what this map shows is not the number of children; it is the share of people aged 65 or older.
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.
Why not compare it with your own country and explore the Chūgoku region with me?
Aging Rate Map of the Chūgoku Region
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 in the Chūgoku region as well.
The aging rate in 2020 was 31.5%, up 2.2 percentage points from 2015. In the supplementary data, the population with known age has decreased while the population aged 65 or older has increased.
Even within the Chūgoku region, aging rates vary widely from one municipality to another.
You, too, might want to look for an area of Japan’s Chūgoku region 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.