The latest numbers on Japanese population make for a dismal reading — the number of people who died in 2022 (1.56 million) was roughly twice as big as the number of newborn children (771,000). Based on residency registrations, the country’s Internal Ministry estimates a total population loss of some 800,000 last year. This is the largest total drop in population since comparable statistics were first collated in 1968.

Japan now has 122.4 million nationals, down from a peak of over 128 million some 15 years ago.

But the issue of Japan’s shrinking population goes much further into the past. Since the 1990s, successive Japanese governments have been aware that the population would start to decline and tried to offer solutions. And yet, the speed of the contraction has caught even the experts by surprise. In 2017, for example, the Tokyo-based National Institute of Population and Social Security Research forecast that the annual number of births would not fall below the 800,000 threshold until 2030.

With the news on Japan’s population decline growing ever more grim, the government of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has announced a series of efforts to encourage more people to have children.

Japan ‘on the brink’

In January, Kishida warned that the nation is “on the brink” of a crisis and that his government would spend around 20 trillion yen (around €128 billion, $140 billion) on measures to support young couples who wish to have more children. This corresponds to around 4% of Japan’s GDP, and is nearly double the amount that the government had earmarked for the same goal in fiscal 2021.

The prime minister also set up a panel to devise ways to spend the extra funds. He also hosted an event in Tokyo in late July to mark the launch of a nationwide campaign to support children and families. The government has agreed on increasing child allowances and putting in additional effort to eradicate child poverty and abuse. New fathers will also be encouraged to take paternity leave and additional funding will go into pre-school facilities so that working parents are able to return to work. Parents will also get greater tax breaks.

Kishida said he aims to win the support of society for children and parents.

“We hope that a social circle friendly to child-rearing will spread nationwide,” he said at the launch event.

Critics, however, are not entirely convinced by the latest proposals. They warn that the previous government had also tried to use spending to encourage a baby boom, but Japanese society has failed to respond.

The population is rapidly aging, and the number of people over 65 is already at close to 30% in Japan. Japan’s neighbors China and South Korea are facing similar troubles, and the number of senior citizens is expected to continue climbing in the next three decades.

Will funding be effective?

“The government is focusing very much on the economic aspect and while the budget they are allocating to the problem is very large and it sounds positive, we will have to see whether it can truly be effective,” said Masataka Nakagawa, senior researcher with the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.

Nakagawa agreed that the latest population statistics were worrying, but warned there are other factors that need to be considered, such as the falling number of marriages. People in Japan are typically getting married later in life and opting to have fewer children, primarily a result of financial pressures, he said.

Chisato Kitanaka, an associate professor of sociology at Hiroshima University, said governments have failed to devise effective policies to solve the population problem, despite knowing that a decline was inevitable.

“There have long been a lot of hurdles for young people who want to have children to overcome,” she told DW. Those include financial and educational concerns, she said, but arguably the biggest problem is social attitudes.

“In Japan, having a child means that a couple has to get married,” she said. “Only 2% of children are born out of wedlock in Japan, but other countries take a far more ‘flexible’ approach to the concept of a family.”

“This is what is considered socially acceptable here and that makes raising a child as a single mother difficult because she has to work and earn money, while at the same time she is singled out by society,” she added.

More foreigners in Japan

Kitanaka believes the government should dramatically increase welfare payments to families to help them raise their children and reduce the substantial costs of education, particularly at the tertiary level.

While looking into the population statistics, Japanese officials also found that nearly 3 million foreign residents were living in Japan, up by more than 289,000, or over 10%, from the previous year. The increase puts the number of foreigners in the Asian country at record high.

And yet, many Japanese are unwilling to seriously contemplate large-scale immigration as a way to solve Japan’s population problem and provide a stable supply of workers.

“It is difficult,” Kitanaka admitted. “There are clearly more foreign residents of Japan now but we as a society are not really thinking about it as a long-term issue. And there are many in Japan who are still not ready to accept foreigners. We need to discuss the sort of Japan that we want to live in for the future.”

    • @Hazdaz
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      171 year ago

      I’m not the person you are responding to, and in general I don’t agree with their post, but there are some rather strange practices in Japan which are absolutely wasteful.

      Years back I used to work in the tradeshow industry. Think CES, FABTECH, SEMA and a ton of smaller industry shows. There are tradeshows all over the world but Japan was different. Japan has a “build and burn” policy. Most booths are designed to come apart, get stored in the off season in a warehouse, and are typically used many of times. They’d be used for a few years and then reskinned to cha ge their look and keep them fresh.

      That’s not what would happen in Japan. After every show, they would burn the booths for that show. Every. Single. Show. It was wildly inefficient. Some of these shows are massive - a little mini city put up a few weeks prior to an event, then the event runs for about a week, and then in Japan they’d take all those booths and just burn them. It’s wild and I can’t imagine the environmental impact of doing that after every show.

      Now this was years back, so things might be different, but with how slow Japan is to change, I’d be surprised if that is the case.

      • @Onfire
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        61 year ago

        I think similar with their houses. While most houses in the US can last up to hundred years. It is common in Japan for houses to depreciate to worthless in a matter of a decade. So it’s common there to buy old house, demolish, and rebuild from scratch. Repeat after every 10 to 20 years.

        • @[email protected]
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          51 year ago

          What I’ve read on forums is that culturally they don’t keep close ties to buildings and see old buildings as just old & obsolete buildings, so the structures are considered disposable.

          This was also largely the case in America until around the time of the second world war and current historic preservation laws gained popularity after Penn Station in New York was demolished

        • @Hazdaz
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          31 year ago

          Excellent example. They also are incredibly backwards when it comes to basic technology. Like they seem to love endless paperwork and still use fax machines. It’s such a weird dichotomy where they have such advanced tech such as robots, but still are stuck in the 80s for other things.

          • @orphiebaby
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            21 year ago

            To be fair, that’s the US too. Just not the exact same things. Can’t speak for other countries.

            • @Hazdaz
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              21 year ago

              EVERY country has its idiosyncrasies but the bizarre cross between super old fashioned and bleeding edge is very much a Japanese thing. In the US a lot of that stuff wouldn’t fly simply because we just don’t really follow tradition. We don’t usually give a shit about how things were done back-in-the-day. We aren’t a particularly history focused country - for better or worse. In this case, very much for the better, for other things not so much.

              • @orphiebaby
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                21 year ago

                I getcha and I agree. I’m being pretty vague and talking about different nuances. ^^

          • @Fract
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            11 year ago

            Fax machines?? Seriously? Do they use them so they look busy sending off faxes or something? So bizarre.

            • @Hazdaz
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              11 year ago

              Looking busy seems to be a common theme from the many videos I’ve seen of Japanese work environment.

        • @Hazdaz
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          21 year ago

          That sure was an interesting industry to work in. Nothing quite like it, quite honestly. Learned a bunch of crazy shit like the “build and burn” stuff and a whole lot more shady business stuff as well. Don’t think it will ever recover in our post-COVID world though. Those days are long done now.

    • @Djeikup
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      91 year ago

      Not the one you asked. I don’t have any statistics, but from what I’ve seen of YouTubers living or visiting Japan is an obscene amount of plastic on the food wrapping/packaging. You open a cardboard box and then there’s a plastic bag inside with small individual portions wrapped in plastic for instance.

      • @[email protected]
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        91 year ago

        While being an environment issue, the plastic wrappings have a practical purpose: protect food from roaches. In many japanese cities you cannot have food open without attracting gokiburi within a few hours. This is also why the japanese keep everything as clean as possible. Even in the shadiest places there is someone with a vaccuum and a stickytape floor roller(!) to prevent the smallest crumb from staying on the floor too long. Eating on the move in the streets is frowned upon, because fallen down crumbs attract roaches. Public trashcans are rare, because - you guessed it - roaches. You are expected to carry any trash back home and put it in a sealed bag in your trashbin. The typical size of japanese houses and flats does not offer much space for storing large food containers, so you buy your food in small portions.

        Of course a more environment-friendly wrapping would be better, but it has to be able to withstand a roach nibbling on it, which is not the case for various organic-based polymers.

    • DM_Gold
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      51 year ago

      Climate change and global warming. Less people = less warming.

      • @Shardikprime
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        1 year ago

        The feedback loop is already positive so no the warming will only keep incrementing. For what you say to happen the whole world population should be decimated to about 8 million people over a night. And it better be in a miraculous way, because if not, with the rotting bodies we will get disease levels that will make the black death a cakewalk.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 year ago

          The feedback loop is positive? I’ve not read that anywhere, are you sure? There’s a number of tipping points, some which we may have passed already but I don’t think there are any beyond the ability of mankind to counter by simply reducing emissions. Seeing as we’re the greatest contributor to greenhouse gases by a mile.