Declining Birth Rate Threatens Japanese Society’s Ability to Function, Kishida Warns

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Japan will cease to function as a society if its birth rate continues to decline, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on Monday, urging his government to create a “children-first economic society”.

“Japan is at a critical point of whether we can continue to function as a society. Focusing on policies regarding children and child-rearing is an issue that cannot be postponed,” Kishida said at a parliament session.

According to Kishida, the government would increase its spending on child-related programs and establish a children and families agency in April to develop policies on children and child-rearing.

“We must establish a children-first economic society and turn around the birth rate,” he stated. “We will also work on the introduction of a career-based scholarship system to reduce the burden of higher education.”

Japan has, in recent years, offered cash bonuses and childcare incentives to encourage people to have more children, but these efforts have had little impact.

The nation’s population currently stands at 125 million and has been in continuous decline for 14 years. Kishida said that the number of births dropped below 800,000 last year, citing government estimates.

Nearly 28 percent of Japan’s population was over the age of 65 in 2017, and this figure is projected to increase to 38.4 percent in 2065, according to a study published by Global Health and Medicine. The working-age population in Japan is shrinking even more quickly due to aging.

Elderly women chat along a street while a mother walks with her child in Tokyo’s Minami-Magome area on July 20, 2021. (Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images)

The ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO) revealed in a 2019 report that Japan’s working-age population dropped from 87 million in 1993 to 75.3 million in 2018, resulting in a severe labor shortage in the country’s economy.

“This not only hurts a country’s growth potential but also affects negatively Japan’s fiscal sustainability due to increases in social expenditure such as higher pension and healthcare spending,” the report reads.

Aside from Japan, China is also struggling with a declining birth rate. China’s population fell last year for the first time since the 1960s, according to Chinese officials, because of fewer births and an increase in deaths, strengthening fears about a long-term economic decline.

The decline, by roughly 850,000 people to a total of 1.41175 billion in 2022, according to the country’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), is the first drop officially reported by China since 1961—the last year of the country’s Great Famine.

The number of the working-age population—which includes 16- to 59-year-old individuals—came in at 875.56 million, or 62 percent of the national population. Those older than 65 are 14.9 percent of the total. The population data doesn’t include people from Hong Kong, Macao, or foreign residents.

Some experts expect China’s economic crisis to be worse than what occurred in Japan in the 1990s. Japan’s shrinking population has been blamed for years of low growth.

China’s population data release came as Beijing announced that the country’s gross domestic product grew just 3 percent in 2022, down from 8.1 percent in 2021.

The blame for the declining population falls mainly on the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) decades-long one-child policy that was imposed in 1979. The Chinese regime resorted to forced sterilization and abortion to enforce the rule, which was lifted in 2016.

The low birth rate is an indication that younger Chinese citizens are now unwilling to have children, Frank Tian Xie, a professor in business and an associate professor of marketing at the University of South Carolina–Aiken, told The Epoch Times in an interview last year.

“Housing, education, child care, and medical costs all add up to an absolutely prohibitive cost of having … children,” he said. “Young people simply do not want to get married or have children as a result of the high costs.”

Naveen Athrappully contributed to this report.