Japan's birth rate fell to its lowest level on record last year, with the country welcoming just 799,728 newborns in 2022, a 5% fall on the prior year. That fact alone would be enough to have demographers worried, but the nation also recorded 1.58 million deaths, a figure up 9% year-on-year, accelerating the decline of Japan’s native population.
Baby boomers wanted
Elon Musk’s tweet that “Japan will eventually cease to exist” if this trend continues is perhaps a bit overstated, as it remains the 11th most populous country in the world with ~126m inhabitants. However, Japan's naturally shrinking population, which it's had for ~15 years, still causes many concerns.
Most obvious is the economic burden that an aging population puts on a smaller workforce. Fewer workers means fewer taxpayers to support retirees. That’s not a problem Japan is facing alone, as people globally are living longer and birth rates are falling — but nowhere is the issue as acute as in Japan. The country currently has the world’s oldest population, with a third of its citizens already over the age of 65.
Fumio Kishida, Japan’s prime minister, hopes to reverse this trend. He’s looking to implement an “unprecedented” set of measures that would focus on child-rearing policies, including increased economic support for parents, child care services and reformed working styles. Of course, these policies will take decades to solve what is a more immediate problem — a quicker fix could be a greater openness towards immigration.
