By 2040, nine million senior citizens will be alone in Japan: Study

Tokyo, April 20 -- Close to nine million Japanese people aged 65 or older will be living alone in 2040, projects a research institute of the country.

According to National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (NIPSSR), 8.963 million senior citizens aged 65 or older will be living alone in 2040. The projections for 2040 were based on census data from 2015, Japan's national newspaper The Asahi Shimbun reported.

The figure represents a 43.4 percent increase over 2015 and means that 17.7 percent of all Japanese households in 2040 would be composed of isolated senior citizens. In 2015, the number of single-member households comprising elderly people aged at least 65 stood at 6.25 million accounting for 11.7 per cent of all hou...