World’s oldest cheerleaders: the faces of Japan’s demographic timebomb

Noshiro, Japan | Wearing hot pink track pants and waving red and silver pom poms, the world’s oldest cheerleaders are warming up for their weekly practice.

The women, aged mostly in their 60s and 70s, laugh easily and chat like schoolgirls – a testimony to the bond that has formed between them since they first formed a cheerleading squad six years earlier.

It is Tuesday night in the northern Japanese city of Noshiro, and this gathering at the local gymnasium is the only sign of life in a town that otherwise feels deserted. The streets outside are empty and many of the shops are permanently shuttered, a reflection of the region’s declining population.

However, the NSD 101 Cheerleaders are determined that life will carry on in a community that has lost most of its children to Japan’s bigger cities. As the music comes on, they spring into action with an energetic dance routine that would give any high school cheerleading squad a run for their money.

“Originally, we organised it to stay fit, We had finished bringing up our kids and had spare time. But it turned into something else. Everyone has made friends here and formed communities,” says Koh Otaki, a spritely 65-year-old who formed the first team in 2016.

“We also need to do this to get rid of our stress. My generation of women have to care for the elderly – our in-laws and our husbands. The students leave and find jobs elsewhere. For those of us who remain we need to stay healthy and active.”

The two cheerleading teams, collectively known as NSD 101 (an acronym for Noshiro Senior Dancers combined with the name of the highway running through the town – Route 101), have risen to fame in Japan. They perform at half-time in televised professional basketball games, and at cultural festivals, shattering the stereotype of cheerleading as a pastime reserved for the young.

“We never used to care about how we looked, but we’ve started getting fashionable and wearing make up,” Otaki tells AFR Weekend, with a twinkle in her eye.

The town’s cheerleading squad has a minium age requirement of 50 and an average age of 66, with the eldest member 78.

The team reflects the region’s – and the country’s – demographics. Japan has the world’s oldest population and Noshiro, about 500 kilometres north of Tokyo, is in Akita prefecture, where the number of residents is falling faster than anywhere else in the country.

The towns and villages surrounded by snow-capped mountain ranges in these former forestry and mining communities are at the epicentre of Japan’s demographic time bomb as the number of deaths outstrips declining birth rates.

New data released this week warned that Japan’s population will fall faster than expected, to 87 million in 2070, from 126 million currently. The forecast by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research was the first official revision of Japan’s population forecast for six years. In 2017, the institute forecast Japan’s population would fall to 88.1 million by 2065. Researchers warned Japan must urgently improve productivity and increase immigration to survive as a nation.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida issued a similar warning in January. “It is now or never,” he said in a speech, although he has so far failed to deliver any meaningful policies to encourage people to have more children.

Almost 30 per cent of Japanese people are aged over 65. The number of births in 2021 reached a record low and parts of the country are struggling to maintain vital infrastructure such as schools, hospitals and rail links.

Japan’s greying communities are also a sober glimpse into the future for Australia and many of the world’s major economies, which are facing their own demographic challenges. China, the world’s most populous country, announced in January that its population is falling for the first time in 60 years after deaths outstripped births in 2022. India is due to overtake China as the world’s most populous country by the end of this week, according to the United Nations.

Japan is not alone, but its population crisis is further advanced than the rest of the world. Japan’s cultural aversion to mass immigration and a growing reluctance to have kids, part of a worldwide trend, also means there is no clear pathway back to growth.

“If we don’t change the situation we will go down the tubes. There is no magic bullet to stop the declining birth rate. It is way too late for the government to be doing something, but it doesn’t mean we have to give up,” says Hiroetsu Kikuchi, 75, a council member and manager of the baseball team in the nearby town of Fujisato. “Kishida said Japan is on the edge of a crisis but Akita is closer to the edge than Japan as a whole. Ageing is a grave situation.”

To make his point Kikuchi, a spritely university-educated farmer, shows AFR Weekend an empty tract of land, in the town of 2800 people, that has been turned into a baseball field after the local high school was torn down. He plays baseball regularly himself as part of a league of teams where the collective age of a team must be 500 to compete. Members of his team range in age from 50 to 82.

Kikuchi says the lack of medical services is the most immediate concern, along with keeping kids in the region for longer by keeping the schools open. The town has one supermarket and a dentist, but the local medical centre is only staffed half a day a week. The nearest hospital is 30 to 45 minutes away by car.

“We have abundant nature, a good junior high, support for couples wanting to have kids, but we can’t offer jobs,” Fujisato’s mayor, Fumiaki Sasaki, tells AFR Weekend. “If we stay as we are, the population will continue to go down. We are working hard to stop this trend. We are getting people to move into the town.”

Sasaki, who faces an election in August, hopes extending schooling years in the town for an additional three years up to the end of junior high school, which is about 15 years, will help stabilise the population.

The demographic challenges are on full display as you drive around Akita prefecture in the northeast of Japan’s main island. Abandoned homes, closed kindergartens and collapsed wooden sheds and farmhouses line the empty streets and fields. At lunchtime in Fujisato, there is hardly a soul out on the street. An old-style barber shop and a coffee house appear to be the only businesses open.

The situation is more dire for the smaller villages outside the populated areas.

“One by one people are leaving or dying so this village will become extinct in five or 10 years,” says Hitoshi Okura, a 70-year-old rice farmer, says. He points to an empty field where his now demolished high school used to stand to make his point. “Back then every grade had 30 kids in it. Now, there are no kids.”

There are 38 households in his village of Yamaya, half the households that existed at its peak, and Okura jokes he is now one of the youngest in the area at 70. His family has been working the same fields for eight generations, but now that his daughter and son have moved out of the area, he will be the last. “We don’t retire here. We just work until we are bedridden.” He says it is now common to see bears in the area, and he has to eat his lunch inside the safety of his truck to avoid an attack.

The Japanese government is trying to revitalise towns like Fujisato by offering home-renovation subsidies for people moving to rural areas, tax breaks and other incentives to young families moving out of big cities such as Tokyo and Osaka, which is where a lot of Japan’s population is centred.

Sheep farmers Yuhei Miyano and his wife Tomomi, aged in their 30s with two kids, are exactly kind of couple the Japanese government wants to attract to rural areas. After returning to Japan from a stint in New Zealand, Miyano jumped at the opportunity to move to Fujisato to establish a sheep farm with the help of generous government subsidies.

“I always wanted to be a proper farmer and my parents live nearby. Fujisato was advertising for people to come, so we applied,” Miyano says during an interview on his farm 30 minutes drive from Fujisato, where he and his wife manage 120 sheep and some deer on 7 hectares.

“We really need more young people to move here or else in 10 years all the farmers will retire. To me, it makes more sense for the old people to move to the cities and the young people to stay here, but that is not going to happen. Even for some young people, they come here, but there are no jobs, and it is hard to stay.”

Japan’s tight immigration policies make it difficult to hire foreign workers to plug the labour gaps in rural Japan. Visas are limited to five years and in 2021 foreigners made up just 2.2 per cent of Japan’s population. However, communities in Akita prefecture are also offering subsidies for some foreign workers.

“I thought Akita sounded interesting. It’s a beautiful area. I wanted to experience a different side of Japan,” says Nishimi Tilakaratne, a 27-year-old marketing officer from Sri Lanka. After working in the ski resort hub of Niseko during the pandemic, she moved to Noshiro a year ago to take up a job working with the local tourism bureau. The government helped pay her moving costs, the deposit on her house and some other basics.

“I was a bit worried at first. There are no other foreigners here and not many people my age. But the government is really trying hard to offer support and people here are friendlier and warmer (than in big cities).”

While towns like Fujisato may not exist in coming decades, their long-term residents say their towns will not become extinct until they are no longer around.

“I never thought about being a cheerleader, but when my husband passed away I didn’t want to be home alone. I love being with my young team members. We have a laugh and sometimes go for a drink after,” Yuki Kaneko, 78, says as she waves her pom poms in the air. (Financial Review)