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.”

  • HamSwagwich@showeq.com
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    1 year ago

    Why would we want to stop population decline when the world is already overpopulated?

    • MrTulip@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      We don’t have an overpopulation problem. We have with resources being hoarded by a small handful of billionaires.

      • makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • electrogamerman@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yes, we have an overpopulation problem. This has nothing to do with resources being hoarded by a small handful of billionaires. I mean thats a problem, but that’s and additional problem to overpopulation.

        We cant continue generating trash the way we do, nor consuming earth resources, generating toxic gases. We are destroying the earth and populating the earth more is just going to accelerate that.

        • Square Singer@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          No, it’s just a waste of resources problem. Have a look at all the stuff packaged in plastic in a supermarket, as someone else further up the comments mentioned.

          Imagine all these things just not being packaged in plastic, like it was just a few decades ago.

          People in the global south are consuming mere percentages of what people in the global north consume, per capita. If we were to actually cut down on the resources we waste for convenience, fun and sheer negligence, Earth could easily support much more than the current population.

          At the current rate we consume ~1.7x the resources that the Earth is able to provide each year. Cut the per capita consumption by 80% (which is easily possible) and we can fit much more people onto this planet.

          Not saying we shoud fit more people here, but currently we don’t have overpopulation, we have overconsumption.

          • electrogamerman@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            We have both tho. Even if we didn’t have over consumption, our current total population would produce a lot of waste and consume a lot of earth resources that would be damaging to the planet

            • AA5B@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              All trends point to over-population being fixed already. You just need to wait 100 years for it to manifest. But it’s not expected to stop, or stabilize, but drop “rapidly” (in a generational sense)

              This is a long term problem, like global warming in the 1970’s. Our lack of action then, locked in what we are seeing now. Similarly, the forecasts for when global population peaks and begins to decline are all in this century but with too many unknowns. Given human lifetime and fertility period, this is already locked in.

              Sounds good, right? The problem is population and resources are not uniform across the globe. We still have too many areas with unsustainable growth and crowding and suffering, before those stabilize. However we also have developed countries passing peak early, despite plenty of resources. The problem is that it’s not stabilizing. It’s not even a slow and steady decrease. This I jumping into cold water levels of shrinkage. This is a serious problem for stability of a society.

              Imagine all the developed countries halving their population in a generation or two. This is not just about wealth, either. Consider infrastructure, consider investment and research, consider entertainment and technology, consider even conservation actions. Every part of modern life is affected by having a mature enough society to deeply specialize in niches and crannies and temporarily profit-less endeavors.

              We can prevent these problems for our grandchildren now, with relatively easy steps to stabilize the population. Otherwise there will be no quick fix, and we can be leaving a disaster for a next generation You too will be one of the next “boomer” generation who doomed society for the young

        • ZodiacSF1969@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Because it’s not good for productive economies that can produce solutions to current problems to stagnate and die. Japan should make moves to encourage a sustainable population growth rate.

          Overpopulation is a problem mostly in struggling economies.

          • electrogamerman@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Overpopulation is a problem overall. The problem with Overpopulation has nothing to do with money. It has to do with consuming earth resources, which cannot be renewed with money

            • AA5B@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Let’s give trees as an example of resource over-utilization solved by money …

              North America chops down a vast amount of trees every year. For paper and wood products, building and fuel, etc. even as a temporary holiday decoration. We destroy a mind-boggling amount of trees every year. Sustainably (mostly). As a mature society with sufficient resources, we are doing a decent job of managing our forest resources for sustainability

              Otherwise …. We all see the headlines screaming about “de-foresting the Amazon” and the global impact.

              Do we want to focus on making the world mature enough to shepherd their resources for sustainability, or are we good with “slash and burn” farming by people desperate to survive?

              • electrogamerman@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                But we do see headlines of de-foresting the amazon.

                Its not really hard to understand. More people means more green areas need to be removed to make new homes, more spaces need to be dedicated to create food for those people, more greenhouse gases are going to be generated thus accelerating the climate change.

        • Orphie Baby@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Population isn’t the issue. It’s bad management of resources and the creation of too many not-truly-disposable resources that is the issue.

      • HamSwagwich@showeq.com
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        1 year ago

        What the hell to you think an overpopulation problem looks like? Jesus, talk about not understanding the problem