Societies around the world, particularly in Asia and parts of Europe, are ageing quickly, due in part to the baby boom generation moving into retirement age, lower fertility rates, higher life expectancies and the imposition of government policies, such as the now abandoned one-child policy in China and restrictive immigration policies in Japan.

Many look to Japan, where the country’s Statistics Bureau reports 29 percent of the population is over 65, as a case study for how a country is changed by an ageing population, including how these shifts can influence the economy, investing opportunities and the social fabric.

Japan has already far surpassed the minimum requirement to be considered a super-aged population, defined by the United Nations as a country where the over-65 population cohort exceeds 20 percent of the total population. “A lot of European countries are very close, but then a lot of the rest of the world is, in the next 30 years, also going to be ther