With women in Japan making inroads into various career fields and having more options to choose from, it's only natural that more of them are starting families in their late 30s or even in their 40s.
Health ministry statistics back up the trend. In 2009, 22.5 percent of the women who gave birth to Japan's 1.07 million babies were 35 or over. The figure includes 30,566 women who bore children at aged 40 or older, a group that is also growing — in 2006, only 22,139 women gave birth when in their 40s.
Yet Japan has long differentiated, if not stigmatized, pregnant women aged 35 or older, calling all childbirths by such women korei-shussan, which literally means "childbirths at a high age."