Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Friday he will raise the nation’s target for the ratio of men taking child care leave to 50% in fiscal 2025, increasing drastically from the current goal of 30%.

He also said he will aim to raise the rate to 85% by fiscal 2030, adding that the bold goals are necessary to reverse the declining birthrate. Those are lofty targets in a country with a famously rigid corporate culture: As of Oct. 1, 2021, the latest data available, the figure was 13.97%.

“We are at a turning point in history and the best way to overcome our challenges is investment in our people,” he told a news conference on Friday, noting that the number of new births has declined by nearly 200,000 over the past five years — to below 800,000 in 2022 for the first time ever.

“The next six or seven years will be our last chance to reverse the low birthrate,” he said. “We will work on changing the national mindset to overcome the challenges.”

To realize his goals, Kishida said he will focus on three areas: increasing the income levels of younger people so they feel confident enough to start a family; changing the mindset and the structure of society to make it easier to raise children; and improving support for all stages of child-rearing.

Specifically, the government will overhaul the child care leave system by raising the state payout if both parents — not just mothers -– take the leave, Kishida said. In such situations, the government will ensure they will be able to fully maintain their income levels while away from work during the leave.

Separately, under the current system, mothers and fathers can also claim government-subsidized child care leave until their child turns 1 year old, or until the child turns 14 months old if the parents split the leave.

The changes to the child care leave system are part of what Kishida has called “unprecedented steps” to address the declining birthrate.

He also said he will try to fix a long-running problem that sees part-time workers, many of whom are women, deliberately trying to earn less money to avoid paying social insurance fees.

The government will begin discussing how to fix the problem, known in Japan as “nenshū no kabe” (the annual income ceiling), by helping employers of such workers shoulder their social insurance fees, he said.

Currently, people can be classified as dependents of the household’s primary breadwinner if they earn less than ¥1.06 million or ¥1.3 million a year, depending on the size of their employers. If they earn more, they cannot remain as dependents and have to pay for their own social insurance.

In a country where men are typically the main breadwinners, many wives have adjusted their work hours to keep their annual income within that ceiling and thus avoid paying social insurance fees. This is believed to be a major reason married women often remain part-time workers and don’t become fully integrated into the workplace. That’s becoming an increasingly serious issue amid a national labor shortage, government officials say.

The proposals will likely be included in new economic and fiscal policy guidelines due out in June. In January, Kishida had instructed related ministries to come up with draft proposals to address the birthrate issue by the end of March.

Kishida expressed hope that these initiatives will help turn around the low birthrate by raising the income levels of young families. Japan’s total fertility rate — the average number of children a woman will bear in her lifetime — stood at 1.30 in 2021, the latest year for which statistics are available.

The low number of births has been a longtime concern for the government, but momentum for bold initatives grew after health ministry data released in February showed that the number of newborns in 2022 fell below 800,000 for the first time since the country started keeping such records in 1899.

Kishida has made support for children and their families his top policy priority. In April, the nation will launch the Children and Families Agency dedicated to issues concerning children, which also includes child poverty and sex crimes.

Exactly how the new policies will be financed, however, remains unclear.

On Friday, Kishida remained vague on the source of the funds needed for the new initiatives.

Whether the set of proposals is enough to reverse the long-term trend also remains to be seen. The low fertility rate is compounded by a mix of factors, including a stagnant economy, the growing disparity between the rich and poor and the slow progress on women’s empowerment, experts say.

Such trends, as well as the perception that child-rearing is too much of a sacrifice for people to make, will not change overnight. Some experts also argue that Japan needs to review the rigid family registration system, which may be discouraging people from having children outside marriage.