Despite the Japanese government having recently launched a new agency to address the country's declining birthrate, experts are calling for more drastic steps than the measures recently announced by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
The Children and Families Agency was created to oversee policies related to children, including tackling child abuse and poverty, and has been established after the number of babies born in the country in 2022 slid below 800,000 more than a decade sooner than the government had estimated.
At 799,728 births, the figure represented a 5.1% drop from the previous year and the seventh consecutive annual fall. It marked the first year births had fallen below 800,000 since records began in 1899, according to preliminary government data released in February.