Japan’s fertility rate hits record low! , more and more young people are unwilling to get married and have children birth rate | fertility rate | get married and have children

Today, not only is the yen continuing to fall, Japan's fertility rate is also in a predicament of falling again and again.

Data released by Japan's Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare on June 5 show that Japan's total fertility rate will drop to 1.2 in 2023, a record low.

Behind the century-old problem of Japan's "low birthrate" is not only the increasing number of young people who are unwilling to get married, but also the continuing soaring medical and welfare costs.

Data show that Japan’s total fertility rate of 1.2 last year was 0.06 percentage points lower than in 2022, and has been declining for eight consecutive years.

Data shows that in order for a country's population to remain stable, the fertility rate needs to reach 2.1.

The total fertility rate generally refers to the average number of children born to women of childbearing age in a country or region. In Japan, women of childbearing age mainly refer to women between the ages of 15 and 49.

According to statistics, the number of births in Japan in 2023 was 727,000, a decrease of 5.6% from the previous year. This is also the lowest level since Japan began to collect relevant data in 1899. The number of births in Japan has been declining for 17 consecutive years since 2007.

The data also shows that the fertility rate in all 47 prefectures in Japan is on a downward trend. Among them, the lowest total fertility rate in 2023 is Tokyo, which is only 0.99, lower than last year's 1.04; the highest is Okinawa Prefecture, which is 1.6, but also lower than last year's 1.70, followed by Miyazaki and Nagasaki Prefectures. The fertility rate is 1.49.

In this context, an intuitive statistic is that due to declining birth rates and population migration, more than 300 schools in Japan close every year.

According to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research in Japan, if the declining birth rate is allowed to continue, Japan's total population will fall back to 100 million in 2050.

Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihashi Hayashi called this an "emergency situation." He said that before 2030, that is, the next six years will be Japan's "last chance to reverse this trend."

Japan is not the only country facing population decline.

Singapore announced in February that the country's fertility rate continued to decline, with the total fertility rate in 2023 initially estimated at 0.97, falling below 1.0 for the first time in history.

The Statistics Korea also announced this year that the country’s fertility rate was 0.72 last year, down from 0.78 in 2022. Some experts have warned that if this continues, South Korea "may become the first country in the world to disappear."

As the fertility data was released, Japan's Diet on Wednesday simultaneously approved a legal amendment aimed at strengthening financial support for parenting parents or pregnant women, expanding the coverage of child care services, and expanding parental leave benefits. As part of the 2024 budget, the Japanese government has allocated 5.3 trillion yen for this purpose and expects to spend 3.6 trillion yen in tax revenue each year over the next three years.

But some experts say these measures only target married couples who plan to have children or have already given birth, and do not include the growing number of young people who do not want to get married. The latter is the fundamental reason for the decline in fertility.

According to data released on Wednesday, the number of marriages in Japan will drop to 475,000 in 2023, a 6% decrease from 2022; the number of divorces will rise to 184,000, an increase of nearly 5,000 from 2022; the average age of women’s first childbirth is 31 years old, compared with 27.5 years in 1995 and 25.7 years in 1975.

In Japanese society where traditional family values ​​prevail, cases of unmarried childbirth are relatively rare. The Japanese government believes that the declining willingness to get married is one of the key reasons for the declining birth rate.

Why are more Japanese young people unwilling to get married? Lin Fangzheng believes that complex factors such as Japan's domestic economic instability and high cost of living are the main reasons for the decline in young people's willingness to get married and have children.

However, Nomura Nomura Research Institute economist Nobuhiro Kiuchi also pointed out that simple welfare measures such as increasing subsidies cannot directly solve the problem of declining marriage and birth rates. Society should make ideological changes, such as reducing gender bias in corporate culture. , giving more space and tolerance to working mothers, etc.

Alana Armitage, an official at the United Nations Population Fund, believes that judging from past experience, policies similar to encouraging women to have children are basically ineffective. Because the fundamental reason why women do not want to have children is that they find it difficult to deal with the relationship between career and family, work and life.

In Japan, the declining birthrate is accompanied by the problem of aging.

According to the top international medical journal "The Lancet", Japan's average life expectancy is currently 84.5 years, ranking first in the world.

Data shows that Japan’s population is about 125 million, and it is expected to decrease by about 30% to 87 million by 2070. By then, 4 out of 10 people will be over 65.

Japanese economist Atsushi Seike said that the proportion of Japan’s population aged 75 and over is growing rapidly, two to four times faster than other countries. “It is estimated that by 2040, more than one-third of Japanese people will be 65 years old. or above."

An increase in the aging population will cause health and welfare costs to soar while the labor force that pays for them shrinks.

But dealing with aging is not just about raising fertility rates. Kiyoe Atsushi said that even if Japan succeeded in increasing the birth rate, these babies would not contribute to the Japanese economy in 20 years. Therefore, in order to maintain the Japanese economy and a life-long active society, it is necessary to promote employment of the elderly.

In terms of "old people continuing to work", Japan can be said to have great advantages. Kiyoe Atsushi listed some data from the OECD and said that the economic participation of Japan's elderly is much higher than that of European countries, with 90% of men aged 60 to 64 compared to 60% in Spain; the proportion of Japanese women is about 60%, while Spanish women are less than 50%.

In the survey results released by the Japanese Cabinet Office in March, 42.6% of the respondents answered "over 66 years old" to the question "How old do they want to work?", an increase of 5 percentage points from five years ago.

In response, Japan continues to enrich systems such as delayed retirement and continued employment. At the end of last year, Japanese companies that allowed employees to work until they were 70 years old accounted for 29.7% of all companies, an increase of 1.8 percentage points compared with the previous year.

However, there is also a view that an “active society” should not be equated with a “society in which people work until old age.” Sancho, head of the Spanish Institute of Elderly and Social Services, said that an active society should pay more attention to the life sustainability of the elderly, which does not point to how long they will work, but whether they have a good quality of life.