Japan's Deepening Population Crisis Breaks 125-Year Record

Births in Japan fell for the ninth-consecutive year last year, according to Health Ministry data released Thursday—the lowest since records began 125 years ago.

Newsweek reached out to the Japanese Foreign Ministry via email for comment outside of office hours.

Why It Matters

Japan's population has dwindled for 15 consecutive years, as fewer people marry and have children. About 30 percent of Japanese are now 65 or older, compounding the demographic challenge and dragging on Asia's second-largest economy as it pulls itself out of a decades-long slump.

Health officials have warned that this decade is Japan's last chance to turn things around.

What To Know

Just under 720,000 babies were born in the country of 124 million last year, despite a flurry of new national and local initiatives and some of the world's most generous parental leave policies.

That's a 5 percent decline since 2023. Meanwhile, two people died for every one born in the super-aged society.

A silver lining was that marriages, which had been on the decline for years, saw a 2 percent increase in couples tying the knot. However, this follows a nearly 6 percent drop from 2022 to 2023.

Japan's demographic woes are shared by South Korea, China, and Taiwan, all of which have fertility rates well below the 2.1 births per woman needed for population replacement.

While this is true of many developed nations, including the United States, East Asia has far lower immigration rates, which limits its options for offsetting population decline.

What People Are Saying

Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said: "We need to be aware the trend of falling births has not been arrested. But the number of marriages posted an increase. Given close ties between the number of marriages and the number of births, we should focus on this aspect, as well."

Ekaterina Hertog, an associate professor at the Oxford Internet Institute and Institute for Ethics in AI who researches Japanese labor practices, previously told Newsweek: "Marriage trends in Japan and South Korea are significantly shaped by economic conditions and their intersection with gender roles...Another important set of factors are family norms, that prescribe children's support of elderly parents and the difficulty of negotiating them in societies which have had low fertility rates for decades."

What Happens Next

One new initiative starting this year is expanding daycare access to a broader range of families, a Japan's Children and Families Agency representative told Newsweek.

Another new policy grants parents who take leave after childbirth an allowance equal to 10 percent of their salary, easing their anxieties about taking time off.