As reported by JapanToday, Japan’s national population is back on its way up again after three consecutive annual declines, which should be temporarily encouraging news for those overly concerned with the birthrate falling too low to feasibly sustain Japan’s future societal structures.

While the ripple of 12,000 new Japanese is far too insignificant to be felt throughout the rest of the country, the census also indicated that Japan’s existing population continues to centralize, sending Tokyo’s own population into new record-breaking territory, by rising over 100,000 since last year.

But there’s a deeper concern at the core of this story, than simple population density; which should come as a disheartening increase for the roughly 5751 Tokyo-ites (nearly 17 times the national rate) already crammed into any given square kilometer off the central Chuo Line out of Shinjuku.

Japan’s population woes are multi-faceted, and not easily resolved. First and foremost, its notoriously low birth rate is potentially jeopardizing the future economy, as the current workforce retires without adequate replacement for those jobs. And secondly, as clearly indicated in Tokyo’s most recent population explosion, as the workforce continues its imbalanced march towards the most central urban areas, a quickly rising number of retired belonging to the alienated rural economies are left to fend for themselves without a proper local support network to replace them. Granted Japan has always been an urban-centric society, built around metropolitan areas in Tokyo, and Osaka, but combined with a birthrate that will soon re-stabilize the imbalance, Japan could soon be facing a crippling societal and economic crisis of as the result of over-centralization.