Japan’s struggle to encourage couples to have more children has been given greater urgency after data showed the annual number of births dropped to below 700,000 for the first time since records began more than a century ago.
According to government data released this week, the number of births reached 686,061 in 2024, a decline of 5.7% from the previous year and the lowest since statistics were first kept in 1899. The data excludes babies born to foreign residents.
The fertility rate – the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime – also fell to a record-low of 1.15, down from 1.20 in 2023, the health ministry said. That is well below the rate of 2.1 needed to keep the population stable. The ministry said 1.6m deaths had been recorded in 2024, up 1.9% from a year earlier.
If current trends persists, Japan’s population of about 124 million is projected to fall to 87 million by 2070, when 40% of the population will be 65 or over.
A shrinking and ageing population could have serious implications for the economy and national security, as the country seeks to boost its military to counter potential threats from China and North Korea.
This forum gets 63 users a day so your appeal is likely to go unanswered. And even if an eccentric English-speaking degrowth-oriented Jap did chime in, that would be a very skewed sample size of 1 - not much use for drawing conclusions compared to, say, a poll.
That said, my understanding is roughly the same as yours. They’re worried about it but not enough to consider mass immigration, which would undermine their prized social cohesion. They would prefer solutions to come from technology (robots) and labor reforms if at all possible. But - things are not panning out perfectly and low-skilled immigration for the healthcare sector is in fact rising. Mostly from SE Asia where the culture is considered sufficiently compatible. Philippines in particular.