Already 60 years have passed since the end of World War II. In a sense, Japan has reached the age of retirement from postwar efforts. As a defeated nation, Japan's demographic development was remarkable, presenting a spearheading experience that could be a prelude to a new population transition.

Japan experienced a massive birth boom in the miserable plight of postwar days, and these baby boomers would later be termed a "mass generation." However, fertility in Japan was startlingly halved within a decade. The remarkable fertility decline in war-defeated Japan was often cited as a miracle with no comparable record in the history of countries in the western cultural sphere. This outstanding fertility decline was significant in that it presented the need for reviewing western-oriented population transition theories, and in that it suggested the potential for non-western-style population transition.

Following Japan, fertility decline in the process of population transition has occurred in Taiwan, China and other countries in East Asia with cultural similarity and geographic proximity to Japan. Further, the same phenomenon has spread rapidly to other countries in culturally diverse Asia such as Thailand, Iran and Mongolia. Fertility transition outside the western cultural sphere can be understood as a process of the spread of the experience originating in Japan.

Notable international contributions that Japan can make are in the field of mortality reduction and the prolongation of life expectancy. The most remarkable mortality reduction is in infant mortality. The infant mortality rate in Japan right after the war was between 60 and 70 per 1,000 live births, but now it is only 3 per 1,000 live births. Japan's experience in achieving the world's lowest infant mortality and longest average life expectancy will contribute to the upgrading and maintaining of world health standards, particularly in developing countries. Ensuring health as the basis for a higher quality life is the basic asset common to all human beings and the source for socio-economic development.

Now human beings are approaching a crucial stage of survival. We should bear in mind that the first half of the 21st century is a challenging age in which we need to build a global community with a stable population structure with a small number of children and a large number of the elderly.