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Japan: Can anything be done to stop population decline?

www.dw.com Japan: Can anything be done to stop population decline? – DW – 08/03/2023

Japan lost 800,000 people last year, with births at a record low and deaths at a record high. The government has plans to reverse this trend, but many fear its efforts will fail.

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."

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