Japan is the oldest country in the world, with 30 percent of its population aged 65 or over. One solution to this grey wave, writes Miho Inada in the Wall Street Journal, is to redefine old. According to a recent government White Paper, only folks over 75 years need be considered “elderly”; the rest are in sprightly “pre-old age.” And presumably available to contribute to the work-a-day economy.
The Frigid Isle
Íris Erlingsdóttir shines a light on the world’s first wholly feminized state. Women, she writes in The European Conservative, run everything in Iceland: “the presidency, the prime minister’s office…[the] national state church…schools, municipalities, police…newsrooms and [the] ever-expanding public bureaucracy.” As for the men, Erlingsdóttir observes, they describe themselves ruefully as (bad-taste alert) “pussy-whipped.”
