The number of children under the age of 14 has been declining for 40 consecutive years and will hit a record low this year, further aggravating the country’s aging population, the Japanese government announced today.
The Kyodo News reports that the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications statistics show that as of April 1, 2021, the number of children under 14 years old is 14.93 million, 7.65 million boys and 7.28 million girls respectively, a decrease of 190,000 compared to last year (2020), which is also the lowest since the statistics were available in 1950.
According to the UN Demographic Yearbook, Japan has the lowest proportion of children among the 33 countries with a population of more than 40 million, and after 47 consecutive years of decline, the proportion now stands at 11.9 percent, well below South Korea’s 12.2 percent and Italy’s 13.3 percent.
The Japanese government says that children under the age of 2 account for 2.65 million, relatively lower than other age groups, indicating that the population decline is due to a drop in the number of births.
Japan’s child population reached a peak of 29.89 million in 1954. It rebounded briefly in the early 1970s, but has been declining since 1982.
The Japanese government has continued to promote policies to encourage childbearing, but the decline in the number of marriages, late marriages, and the Wuhan pneumonia (new coronavirus disease, COVID-19) epidemic have accelerated the phenomenon of fewer children in Japan.
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