







I read the article about younger generations being less religious around the world. (Here is the article I read if you are interested).

Japan is a graying nation and the proportion of older adults is expected to go up in the future. The article made me curious about whether Japanese people have been getting less religious overtime as a whole with a higher proportion of older adults and a lower proportion of younger adults.

I examined the statistics of The Institute of Statistical Mathematics and made two figures below. The Institute of Statistical Mathematics has surveyed Japanese people whose ages are over 20 nationwide in Japan every 5 year since 1953. Please see this page if you are interested in how they get the statistics.

Are Japanese people getting less religious than past generations ?









The first graph above indicates that there was not much change in religious belief of Japanese people over time from 1958 to 2013. There was no data for 1953 for this survey. The people who hold religious beliefs are hovering around at 70% of all Japanese people who are older than 20 year old.

Do you consider religious feelings important ?









However, when the survey changed the question and asked Japanese people if they consider religious feelings important or not, Japanese people now tend to believe that religious feelings are not important (Please see Figure 2 above).

Younger generations are getting less religious









Figure 3 shows the percentage of Japanese people by age group who don’t think religious feelings are important. I looked at the Japanese people who answered “No” in Figure 2 by age in order to make Figure 3. In all the age groups, the percentages have been increasing in all age groups basically. Also, it can be observed that basically the younger the generation is, the less religious Japanese people are.

It is my personal experience that’s what’s happening now to Japanese people especially to younger generations. In my opinion, the reason why people are getting less religious is the mandatory education in Japan does not teach you to believe in some kind of God or religion. Also, with the expansion of internet technology, a large mass of information is available, which makes the way of thinking of Japanese people diverse. I hope people will accept a variety of beliefs and values in this diverse globalized world.

The religious activities are becoming diverse nowadays in Japan. For example, Japanese monks held a live music event, which could never exist 50 years ago in Japan. If you are interested, please enjoy the YouTube video below.





