Baby boomers’ loneliness boosts Japan’s public accounts

Behind this figure, there is not an accounting anomaly, but the result of a sudden demographic transformation: accelerated aging, collapse of marriages and sustained increase in deaths due to loneliness They have generated a new flow of assets which, for lack of rights holders, automatically end up in the hands of the State.

The process is also slow and expensive because when a person dies without a spouse or children, a liquidator appointed by the family court must settle debts, taxes and funeral expenses before the assets can be transferred to the public treasury.

In practice, this turns houses, land and bank accounts into assets that are tied up for years due to legal proceedings.

At the same time, the country is already accumulating more than nine million abandoned houses (Akiya) which deteriorate without anyone taking ownership or maintenance.

Municipal councils, particularly in towns and medium-sized towns, devote increasing resources to the inspection, walling or demolition of properties, which generates an obvious paradox: extraordinary revenues for the central state and an increasing operational and social burden for local administrations.

The paradox is accentuated when we observe who the protagonists of this trend are. A good part of the people who die today without heirs belong to the generation that built modern Japan. THE baby boomers of the post-war period, protagonists of the economic miracle, are today arriving at the end of their lives without a spouse, without children or with broken family ties.

Decades of extreme working hours, personal resignations and a social model penalizing care and conciliation have led to an old age marked by isolation. Added to this is a persistent taboo: talking about death and planning the distribution of property remains uncomfortable in a society that avoids conflicts until the last moment.

The result is that Millions of elderly people die without having made a willeven knowing that their assets will inevitably end up in the hands of the State.

The Japanese legal framework offers few alternatives. The legislation only allows assets to be allocated to third parties – such as carers, friends or social entities – through a formal will; Without this, there is no room for donation or community use.

Even when there are distant heirs, the locating and consensus processes can drag on for years, tying up properties and overwhelming family courts.

Inheritance law experts warn that the system is not prepared for the coming avalanche: with more than 1.6 million deaths per year and an increasingly aging population, the number of ownerless workers will steadily increase.

At the same time, the rise of these inheritances without heirs generates a perverse incentive for the central administration. Each asset that ends up in the hands of the State represents a direct injection of extraordinary income in a context of economic stagnation, accelerated aging and increasing pressure on the retirement and health system.

Rising incomes – quadrupling in just ten years – do not require unpopular reforms or explicit tax increases, reducing the political urgency to tackle the problem at the root.

Analysts and experts point to a clear conflict of interest: The worse family disintegration becomes, the greater the flow of assets to the state and the less incentive it has to promote legal changes that facilitate the donation, will, or social reuse of those assets.

The root of the problem is, to a large extent, cultural and political. For decades, the Japanese family model was based on the presumption of continuity: marriage, filiation and transmission of heritage within the lineage. This system has been eroded without the legal framework being adapted.

Talking about a will, designating alternative heirs or planning the end of life remains taboo for a large part of the elderly population, even among those who know they will die alone. To this is added a Rigid legislation that makes it difficult to transport goods to caregivers, NGOs or social initiatives if there is no formal will.

The result is a system that penalizes foresight and, de facto, rewards inaction: those who do not decide leave their inheritance to the State.

The implicit message that the Government sends to the younger generations is as silent as it is devastating. In a country where raising a family is increasingly difficult, where housing is expensive in employment areas and where family reconciliation remains a pipe dream, the State does not offer real incentives to build stable life projects.

The social contract that sustained postwar Japan – hard work in exchange for security, family and continuity – collapsed without anyone daring to propose a new one.

The result is a generation that works, contributes and supports a system that promises neither vital stability nor symbolic return. Young people perceive that the State assumes that they will not have children, that they will live alone and that finally, their assets will end up automatically returning to the administration if they do not leave everything blocked.

It is not an explicit message, but it is profoundly clear: the system does not expect continuity, it only manages the disappearance of its own people.

This logic has profound economic consequences. When the future is seen as a closed line and not as a continuity, long-term investment is no longer rational. Without children, without heirs and without a horizon of transmission, the accumulation of wealth loses its economic and symbolic meaning, and consumption becomes defensive and short-term.

The economy thus enters a state of decline management: less entrepreneurship, less risk, less innovation and a growing dependence on unproductive income linked to death and not to the creation of value.

In this context, the normalization of inheritance without heirs as a stable source of income redefines the relationship between the State and its citizens. A system that works best when people don’t marry, have children, and die alone sends a troubling signal about the future it considers plausible and acceptable.

The risk is not only moral, but strategic: no economy can be sustainable in the long term if its implicit horizon is the orderly extinction of generations which should guarantee continuity.

Japan became a social and demographic failure into a stable source of public revenue. The unknown is no longer how much the state will continue to earn, but how long a country can survive balancing part of its accounts with the death in solitude of the generation that built modern Japan and made its economic leadership in Asia possible.