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.”
What good could possibly come from unlimited population growth?
From 1973 to 2023 the world population doubled. If that trend continues, doubling every 50 years, by the year 2123 there will be 32 Billion people on Earth.
We can’t even house and feed the 8 billion we have now, not to mention the ecological damage that would be inevitable due to expansion and urbanization.
Even if we just double the current population to 16 billion people 100 years from now it won’t be sustainable. We need to find a new system that isn’t reliant on the next generation being bigger than the previous generation because we’re less than a century from it collapsing anyway. We have finite space on this planet and infinite growth will fill that up very quickly.
The main problem in Japan is the birth rate basically doesn’t even replenish the outgoing population. Japan also have one of the longest life expectancy. Tell me how can you take care of 10 seniors in a retirement home if there’s only 1 working age person to take care of them?
Robots!
Half the people are hand-wringing about robots taking all the jobs. The other half are hand-wringing about population decline leaving too few working-age people to do all the jobs.
Seems like these 2 problems cancel each other out.😎
That’s because you are ignoring how these retirees financial needs are met. Things like social security systems require people paying in. Robots aren’t going to make up the shortfall in tax revenue.
The easiest way is to make sure it’s not a 10:1 ratio to begin with. And, You don’t need 1 nurse per person, if you give a nurse 2 patients for the day for a 2:1 ratio it’s better care than most people get right now.
“The easiest solution is to simply not have a problem”
Wow thanks.
We can house and feed everyone, but we don’t because it is not profitable to do so. Destroying the planet by selling and using fossil fuels makes a lot more money.
If I offered you a home but it was in rural Minnesota with no services or people around for miles would you want to live there?
We can house everyone but not everyone is going to want to live where we have space for them.
Well, a lot of people would rather live somewhere other than where they live. Most people might not want to live in the middle of nowhere, but if the house were available, there would be some people who want it.
The issue is most of the available housing is in places that do not have jobs
I won’t, but maybe a homeless person will take every opportunity they can to get out of the cold streets, you know?
What if the place where you can be relocated to has no job opportunities?
Removed by mod
Let’s start worrying when the global population is actually shrinking then. Not that I would worry, however, as the world was seemingly just fine in 1950 with 2.5 billion.
Things like social security/national pension plans require a steady stream of workers paying taxes into the system so retirees can take money out of it. When you get to the point where more people are retired than the workers can support you have serious issues. Thus the issue is maintaining this population not necessarily growing it.
true, but only if you examine it within the lens of current predatory capitalism. We could all live prosperous lives without worrying about “retirees” if we had an equitable system.
No this exists regardless of your economic philosophy. You need more stuff being contributed than taken no matter what philosophy you follow.
Break it down to the simplest analogy of human survival.
Let’s say you have a tribe of 20 people. 6 are children, 8 are adults who hunt/gather and 6 are elders who stay in the village. The 8 productive ones feed all 20 equally.
If that tribe loses 2 people, regardless of which demographic, the amount of productivity may go down, but so does the need to be productive.
If the tribe loses 2 of the productive adults or the demographics shift so that the adults have to take care of more children or elders, it can be a bit harder of the tribe, but ultimately not if everybody is sharing the resources.
The reason it gets harder in our world is that we don’t share. So when populations change the burden continues to fall only on the exploited class of workers and not on the people hoarding the wealth.
So in the tribal analogy, 1 of the 20 people would take 90% of the productive value of the tribe, regardless of the circumstances, so when the tribe loses some members the 1 person doesn’t suffer because he’s insulated himself completely with his wealth.
The problem with your analogy is it presumes that losing 10% of whatever resource it is you are discussing does not have life altering consequences. Losing those two productive adults would be horrific if everyone was just getting by with all adults working at full capacity.
It’s further complicated by the fact that someone will not always die at the same time as someone stops working. It is possible that fewer workers will need to support more people which again is hard if everyone is just getting by in the initial setup.
Finally it’s made more difficult if the numbers are different such as 12 elderly 6 adults and two kids. The moment someone drops out of the workforce the productivity takes a huge hit.
In every instance a greater number of workers fixes the issue. It is a problem of numbers not distribution.
That sounds like a pyramid scheme.
Then you are confused as to how pyramid schemes work.