In its Respect for the Aged Day (Sep. 21) report, the internal affairs ministry made public its information about the population n Japan. As of Sept. 15, Japan's population stood at 127.56 million, down 120,000 from a year before. People aged 65 or over numbered 28.98 million (12.39 million men and 16.59 million women), accounting for 22.7 percent of the total population and up 800,000, or 0.6 percentage point, from a year before.

The total number of elderly people and their percentage of the population have reached the highest levels since comparable statistics were first taken in 1950. Now, a quarter (25.4 percent) of Japanese women and one-fifth (19.9 percent) of Japanese men are 65 or over.

People 70 or over numbered 20.60 million, up 440,000 from a year before, and accounted for 16.1 percent of the total population. People 80 or over numbered 7.89 million, up 390,000, and made up 6.2 percent of the total population. The total numbers and percentages are record highs.

Last year the average life spans for Japanese women and men were 86.05 and 79.29, respectively, the longest ever. Japan has had the longest-living women in the world for 24 straight years. The life span for Japanese men is the fourth longest.

While average life span has lengthened, it seems that many elderly people apparently do not enjoy their lives. As of October 2008, 18.21 million households, or 36.7 percent of the nation's total number of households, had one or more people aged 65 or older. In 4.14 million of them, an elderly person was living alone; this number is 4.2 times greater than the 980,000 households with a lone elderly occupant in 1983.

Living alone can be very hard unless people are lucky enough to have friends or relatives with whom they can freely meet or talk. They may have to make efforts to maintain a human network. A Cabinet Office survey shows that some 40 percent of elderly people living alone have close relations with neighbors. But the percentage is declining year by year. People living around elderly people need to make deliberate efforts to talk to them and be intrusive in a friendly way to help them.