Japan’s Health Ministry reported on Wednesday that the country’s birth rate has dropped to a “dangerous” level for the eighth consecutive year, as the government works to improve support for parents. According to data released by the ministry, Japan’s birth rate, or the average number of children a woman is anticipated to have in her lifetime, reached 1.2 in 2023, well below the rate of 2.1 necessary to maintain the population stable.
This rate fell from the 2022 figure of 1.26, marking the eighth consecutive year of decline in this country of 124 million inhabitants. A Health Ministry official responsible for statistics told Agence France-Presse that “the continued decline in the birth rate means we are in a dangerous situation.”
She added that “various factors such as economic instability and the difficulty of reconciling work and raising children” can explain this drop in rates. Declining births are a common phenomenon in developed countries, and the rate in Japan remains higher than that of neighbouring South Korea, which has the world’s lowest birth rate at 0.72.
Nevertheless, with the world’s oldest population after Monaco, Japan is scrambling to find ways to encourage a baby boom and avoid a looming demographic crisis. Parliament approved legislative changes on Wednesday to provide increased financial support to parents, improve access to childcare and increase paternity leave benefits.
It is the government’s latest move to boost the birth rate, an issue that Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has stressed as an urgent threat to Japanese society.
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