Things are moving pretty fast with Japan’s population crisis! In just last year alone, they saw a drop of over 800,000 in the number of Japanese people living in the country. Other East Asian countries are facing similar challenges too.
Let’s break it down. On January 1st this year, there were a total of 125.4 million people hanging out in Japan, counting both Japanese folks and foreign residents. This is according to some data that the Japanese internal affairs ministry put out on Wednesday.
Now, here’s an interesting twist. The number of foreign folks living in Japan actually went up by nearly 289,500 from the previous year – that’s a huge jump of more than 10%.
However, it’s a different story for the Japanese folks. Their numbers dropped by 800,523! This marks the 14th straight year of population decrease since they hit a high point in 2009, according to the ministry. Talk about a prolonged baby drought!
Guess what, for the first time ever, the number of Japanese people fell in every prefecture across the nation, as a Ministry spokesperson disclosed to CNN.
Despite the decrease, Tokyo’s total population experienced a slight bump, thanks to an influx of foreign residents.
On a more serious note, 2020 witness a record-breaking number of deaths at 1.56 million – way more than double the number of births, which stood at a mere 771,801 newborns. This discouraging stat was revealed by the Ministry itself.
Oh, seems like this info was repeated. So just to reiterate, the number of deaths last year shot up to a peak at 1.56 million, a figure that easily dwarfed the number of births which was only 771,801 babies. This concerning figure was confirmed by the Ministry.
Japan’s population has been shrinking for over a decade and this is causing some serious issues for the folks running the world’s third-largest economy. It’s a one-two punch situation. On the one hand, there’s a soaring number of old folks, on the other, there’s a shrinking number of workers to foot the bill for pensions and health care as more and more people age.
Since the flashy years of economic growth back in the ’80s, Japan’s population has been on a steady downhill slide. The average family is having just 1.3 kiddos, which is way below the 2.1 needed to keep the population stable if no one was coming into the country from elsewhere.
To top it off, people in Japan live a really long time. In fact, in 2020 nearly one out of every 1,500 people in Japan were a hundred or older, according to what the government is saying.
Same deal is happening in China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. These countries are also having a tough time convincing the younger generation to have more kids, thanks to skyrocketing living expenses and social issues.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan raised alarm bells in January. He said that Japan is just about to lose its ability to keep the society functioning, thanks to these worrying trends.
To fix this situation and keep the population balanced, Japanese authorities have made efforts to attract more foreign residents and workers. But hey, this is Japan, a country known for its homogeneity and low immigrant numbers. So, needless to say, this isn’t exactly a walk in the park!
Back in 2018, Japan’s lawmakers gave the thumbs up to a new policy – an idea from their former Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe. This policy made room for a whole new bunch of visa categories, potentially letting 340,000 foreign workers in Japan to nab high-skill and low-wage jobs.
Fast forward to 2021, and the Japanese government made another big move. They said they were mulling over the idea of letting foreigners in specific skilled jobs stick around for good.
But, like a lot of things, Covid-19 put a big, fat spanner in the works. The pandemic meant Japan had to press pause on progress, closing its doors to foreign nationals and imposing lockdowns in lots of prefectures.
That doesn’t change the fact that Japan needs a much bigger pool of foreign workers to meet the government’s economic targets. In fact, a Tokyo-based research organization let slip last year that Japan needs about four times as many foreign workers as it had in 2020 by the time we hit 2040.
However, they warned, to pull that off, Japan needs to get their house in order first. This means making sure migrant workers’ human rights are respected, and giving a nudge towards social change so Japan can be more welcoming to foreigners.
[sourcelink link=”https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/27/asia/japan-population-drop-2022-intl-hnk/index.html”]
