Japan Annual Births below 700,000 for 1st Time in 2024
Tokyo, June 4 (Jiji Press)--The annual number of babies born to Japanese citizens in Japan fell below 700,000 for the first time on record in 2024, the health ministry said Wednesday.
The annual number came to 686,061, the lowest since records began in 1899. The figure was down by 41,227 from 2023, marking the ninth consecutive year of decline.
Japan's total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime, hit a new record low of 1.15, down 0.05 point and also falling for the ninth straight year.
The annual number of births peaked at around 2.69 million in 1949, and has been on a downward trend since around 1975. It slid below one million in 2016, 900,000 in 2019 and 800,000 in 2022.
The government is working intensively to address the issue, based on its child future strategy, but it has been unable to stem the increasingly rapid decline in births.
The decline in births is occurring at a pace about 15 years faster than the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research estimated. "The critical situation remains unchanged, and we will focus on taking countermeasures," a health ministry official said.
The latest data showed that the fertility rate was generally higher in western Japan than in eastern Japan. Among the country's 47 prefectures, Tokyo logged the lowest fertility rate, at 0.96, the northeastern prefecture of Miyagi had the second-lowest rate, at 1.00, and the northernmost prefecture of Hokkaido had the third-lowest rate, at 1,01.
The southernmost prefecture of Okinawa had the highest fertility rate, at 1.54, followed by the central prefecture of Fukui, at 1.46, and the western prefectures of Shimane and Tottori and the southwestern prefecture of Miyazaki, each at 1.43.
Meanwhile, the number of couples who got married in 2024 totaled 485,063, up by about 10,000, the first increase in two years. The average age at first marriage was 31.1 for men and 29.8 for women, while the average age at which women gave birth to their first child was 31.0, unchanged from the previous year.
The annual number of deaths came to 1,605,298, around 80 pct of which were of people aged 75 or older. The natural population decline, or the number of deaths minus that of births, reached a record high of 919,237.
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