A worrying demographic upheaval is happening in Japan. In fact, over the last 30 years approximately 40% of small Japanese municipalities are at risk of disappearing. The motivation is the decline in the female population of childbearing age. The National Population and Social Protection Research Institute revealed that in 744 of Japan’s 1,729 municipalities, the percentage of women aged 20 to 39 is plummeting and could halve by 2050.
The causes
Japan is not a country for women and even less for young women. Gender disparity in cultural and social models has a major impact. Parental leave is still not very widespread among fathers: only 17% of Japanese men took it in 2022, compared to 80% of women, who thus have a burden considered increasingly less acceptable.
The consequences
This decline risks bringing a sharp decline in births with a consequent unstoppable decrease in the population. Official data indicates that in 2023 in Japan the number of newborns fell by 5.1%, at a historic low compared to the previous year, at 758,630. A factor which, considering the deaths, caused a reduction in the population of almost 832 thousand units, the largest margin ever recorded. Obviously the research found that most of the municipalities with the highest estimated declines in women of childbearing age are the villages and towns in rural areas and warns that the trend of declining birth rates on a national scale has not changed, although compared to the previous report in 2014 there has been an improvement due to the growth of foreign residents. The National Research Institute estimated that the number of births would settle below 760,000 starting from 2035. But instead all this happened 10 years earlier. In Japan, almost a third of the population is at least 65 years old and the average age is the highest in the world, 48 years. Also according to the National Institute of Population and Social Welfare Research, up to 42% of Japanese women born in 2005 will never have children.
What to do?
The Prime Minister Fumio Kishida he defined the phenomenon as the “most serious crisis Japan faces” and announced “unprecedented measures”, such as strengthening child care and promoting pay increases for younger workers. Kishida has already allocated nearly $24 billion annually over the next three to five years, thereby doubling spending on child care by the early 2030s.
