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.”
Maybe if they’d fix their work culture this wouldn’t be as big of an issue.
It really is wild to me that the government isn’t working to put restrictions on working hours. It seems that focusing on the benefits of having children, not focusing on building more marriages seems to be a miss from the government.
You mean like the the “Work Style Reform” laws they passed a few years ago aimed at exactly that?
That is always my first thought when this topic comes up. Often not just with Japan. It is a problem in many countries.
I’m from Tokyo, so I’m saying this as someone with a direct stake in the matter, but is this really a problem? The Earth is on fire right now, the oceans are literally boiling, it is face-melting hot here. The consequences of the period of unsustainable growth are finally coming to pass. There was a report yesterday saying we’d passed the yearly mark for what the planet can provide, and we’d need 1.7 Earths now to meet everyone’s needs. So maybe naturally reducing the population isn’t such a bad thing.
Governments by and large occupy a mindspace that is “individuals must be subjugated for the needs community”, but not “we must subjugate ourselves for the needs of the planet.”
It’s only a problem in the near term as those of us in middle age are going to face increasing taxes and cuts of social programs to support the older folks. I plan on retiring here (Japan). I agree we’re way over-populated here for the resources we have and think it should decline, but it’s going to be rough.
I think more remote work or companies moving out of Tokyo could help things as it would make getting into daycare and such easier for families with kids, but I don’t see that happening.
We don’t need 1.7 Earths to meet everyone’s needs, we need beter distribution.
Overall it isn’t a bad thing, but on a societal level it makes life harder for the working population supporting the elderly. From what I’ve read on working culture in Japan it’s hard enough to begin with.
It’s really an economic problem more than anything. If money were no object it would certainly make sense to simply reduce the size of villages and cities as population and therefore demand shrinks
You can even see this happening in places like Detroit where they’ve bulldozed blocks of abandoned houses from the hayday as the city population shrunk significantly and may not return to those previous levels for quite some time
The general population decline that Japan is experiencing is something every developed nation will likely experience sometime this century as poorer nations develop and modernize. The United States would be declining at a similar rate if not for how many people immigrate to the US. Canada even more so due to their extremely lenient immigration laws compared to the US.
If money were no object communities could take advantage of this shrinking to replace empty deteriorating single family homes with parks, affordable housing, green space, or community space. Blocks of empty suburbs could be far more easily converted into more sustainable land uses if most of the people who once lived there are gone
For Japan, you could encourage growth in the economy again, and encourage population growth by simply requiring companies to give ample vacation time, and require people to use said vacation time.
It’s fucking ridiculous how much time Japanese people are forced to work. They basically spend the entire day at the office, sometimes the entire night with staff because companies force staff into not mandatory but totally mandatory afterwork drinking parties, and by the time people get back to their tiny homes and apartments, they might get a Sunday off to sleep off the exhaustion, then it’s back into the office.
Many Japanese youth never even see their father, meanwhile they themselves are relentlessly robbed of their time by schools, after school clubs, cram schools, English Schools, test prep, and stupid amounts of homework they’re expected to finish on top of that. Many of my students are on summer holiday, but are just as busy as school time thanks to all the homework they’re saddled with and the clubs and jukus certainly don’t let up for summer.
Nobody respects other people’s free time here, thus people don’t have the energy to do anything outside of their daily cycle, let alone fuck. Why buy a game console, TV, or a nice car when you never have time to enjoy it. Why go to Okinawa, or Fukuoka or Hokkaido when you’re only going to have 3 days tops to enjoy it, and if you do somehow get a week to blow, why not take the dream trip to Hawaii, and spend your money out of the country.
Japanese population and economic troubles ultimately cycle back to the end of free time that the miracle period encouraged, and the bubble economy drove into overdrive. They have tried everything but taken this issue seriously, and the only thing they’ve come close to resembling addressing this is creating more national holidays, which are always way off from any vacation period, and many companies try to get out of giving time off, ands those that can’t expect workers to make all the time up the day after.
They are literally working themselves to death here.
I’m from Tokyo and have been working 20+ years, the idea that all Japanese work themselves is meme nowadays. Yes, it was like that before, and there are still a few companies like that now, but it’s not representative of the whole anymore. We do get vacations. There are 16 public holidays a year, 10 vacation days required by law with an extra day for each year of service at the company, and the government will fine companies that don’t force their employees to use at least half of them every year.
“Overtime” is also a bit of a joke. The average salaryman does probably 2 hours real work every day. The rest is just trying to look busy while dicking around on facebook. And attitudes about that are slowly changing too. I rarely see anyone younger than 35 hang around the office late to look busy anymore, they know there’s no point because it’s not going to get you a raise or a promotion anymore.
Is it now acceptable to leave the office on time and not join the after work nomikai?
What after work nomikai? The few companies that were still doing that stopped after covid.
Japans attitude to foreigners who decide to try and live there isn’t helping this problem either.
Can’t force people to have kids. When the environment simply can’t support a population, it stops growing. It’s in basic biology. People can’t afford it anymore, we’re at a limit.
So, people can’t afford having kids because of crooked monetary/distribution system we live and that is environment taking care of things? Do you forget to breathe sometimes if you think too much?
Endless growth is not possible within a finite system. Population dips are inevitable and should be celebrated and accounted for.
Why do these people always want to promote unlimited growth? Oh wait, higher profits
It seems stupid to be concerned with maintaining growth given the abysmal outlook of the sustainability of human society if it continues on it’s current course.
But social/medical security for the elderly is also funded by workers, so I can see why population decline warrants concern.
It just seems to me that we should be focusing on things like automation and healthcare to actually solve the problem rather than trying to brute force it by increasing population everywhere. That’s just not sustainable in the long term, for us nor the planet. But I am not an expert on this subject
Hospitals need workers too.
This problem will fix itself once all these geriatric morons die off. That goes for basically all problems in the whole world.
New geriatric morons are created daily.
nice ageism.
Remind me again what age group has more captive wealth? Twenty somethings or the elderly? Who is banned from public office? Twenty somethings or the elderly?
Give me a fucking break.
Are you looking forward to the day when you’re elderly and future generations blame you for events you lived through but didn’t personally cause?
I thought the youth were the ones who didn’t vote?
If you’re not giving up luxuries and comfort to prevent it, then you are complicit.
Oh? What luxuries and comforts are you giving up for the sake of future generations? It’s presumptive of you to assume future scapegoating enthusiasts will care enough to carve out an exception for you when they blame huge groups of people collectively for the problems of tomorrow.
What luxuries and comforts are you giving up for the sake of future generations
Red meat, dairy, most other animal products, driving, cheap electricity, a large house, 24/7 climate control, and cheap new clothes. Cheap imported food. Bought-new electronics. Higher paying jobs I am qualified for, higher paid jobs that require a car for no reason. Not having my face in a facial recognition database my local police makes of people recorded at protests which is used to screen public servant applications (in spite of nothing illegal happening). Just to name the most significant that immediately come to mind.
I also still own my culpability for not doing more rather than narcissistically trying to deflect blame.
Your turn, asshole.
I appreciate that you walk your talk. Now if only you could do it without being so abrasive. I doubt future generations will look at our time in history books and say, “those assholes ruined the planet, but @schrodingershat was cool.”
I also avoid driving, flying, don’t use climate control, minimize my waste, and use far fewer resources than average, but I also don’t assume everyone in generations older than the one I’m part of are to blame for the ills of the world. Regardless of what groups they were born into, one should judge individuals by their own merits. Otherwise, you’ll be lumping huge amounts of people together inappropriately and showering blame on them all without regard for the individual choices they made.
There are sadly plenty of people who are both old and poor.
Your real issue is with capitalism, not the elderly.
Could you tell me the age range that controls the gears of capital and governance?
Why would we want to stop population decline when the world is already overpopulated?
We don’t have an overpopulation problem. We have with resources being hoarded by a small handful of billionaires.
I walk around the supermarket. Look at the amount of plastic. Then multiply that by all supermarkets in the world. We have many problems. Many.
What the hell to you think an overpopulation problem looks like? Jesus, talk about not understanding the problem
Busting nuts in Japanese ladies, probably.
I’m ready to enlist for this service.
https://media.tenor.com/An7o31StRbcAAAAd/starship-troopers.gif
It’s not hard to move to Japan. It’s hard to move to Japan and earn a decent wage. I am in a high earning career when working for US companies. If I were to do the exact same job in Tokyo, I would earn less than half of my current base pay, no bonus or stock options. I know this because I was living there and interviewing a lot… Finding work was not hard. Taking that kind of pay cut would be stupid.
The main jobs that the Japanese are happy to allow foreigners to have is mostly around teaching English. I dated many English teachers when I was there and the general consensus was that if you had a working face, you could teach English. Anyone who is unemployable in their home country can move to Japan to teach English. The catch is that you’re going to earn $15-20k per year.
I deeply love living there and miss it daily but it’s just not a good deal in the global labor market. If they made a remote worker visa though, I would be the first person in line to apply for it.
The main jobs that the Japanese are happy to allow foreigners to have is mostly around teaching English.
This is not true by any stretch of the imagination, my friend. Foreigners do all kinds of jobs over here, including jobs in manufacturing, healthcare, and service. If there were a pie graph of all the jobs foreigners do, teaching English would be a teeny tiny slice.
The top five origin countries of foreign residents coming to Japan are Vietnam, China, Korea, the Philippines, and Indonesia. These people are not being employed in teaching English. The US is next, but Americans work in a lot of industries–especially IT–and not just English teaching. After that comes Thailand, Brazil, Taiwan, and Nepal to round out the top 10. Also not English teachers.
Opening up options for immigration that allow a reasonably easy path to citizenship would help.
Unlike China there are tonnes of people who want to live in Japan. The only problem is that the immigration laws are extremely restrictive. They could solve this issue today, if politics gets in the way of doing so then it’s on them.
Well fuck.
Genuine question, what are the upsides to population decline?
Japan is massively overcrowded. This population decline is only a bad thing if you look at population in terms of capitalism: growth growth growth!
Houses here are tiny, people don’t have yards, most places don’t even have sidewalks. Parking is a huge issue, especially as more families own multiple cars. Newly constructed houses often have more parking space than floorspace.
Instead of trying to come up with newfangled ways to raise the population, what we should really be doing is preparing for a future with a smaller population. The population decline is not a permanent trend; it is a correction resulting from overpopulation.
There is the very real problem that there won’t be enough workers to support the retired non-workers.
Bingo. This is the problem we should be working to solve, rather than trying to convince women to squeeze out babies they don’t want to have or can’t afford to have. We need to come up with plans to address the changing facts, not desperately try to salvage a status quo that no longer exists.
