In the early days of a new year, when most of the public is on holiday and many people are traveling away from home, it is all too easy for important news to be overlooked or even dismissed as nothing new. That seems to have been the case with the scant attention paid to the announcement published on the first day of 1999 that the divorce rate in this country continued to soar in 1998, that the death rate increased slightly -- and, notably, so did the numbers of marriages and births. If the Health and Welfare Ministry expected to make a strong impression with its 100th such annual report of demographic statistics, however, it could not have chosen a worse time.

With the popular media stressing the ministry's estimate that a record 243,000 Japanese couples were divorced in the first 10 months of 1998, an increase of some 20,000 from 1997, the significance of some of the other figures in the report received short shrift. To be sure, that one couple split up every two minutes and 10 seconds last year and that the total number of divorces was five times higher than in the late 1930s, when the rate was especially low, makes compelling news, helped along by the announcements of divorces and separations among sports and entertainment celebrities. But most reports fail even to address the question of why divorce has become so common in Japan or the fact that the stigma once attached to failed marriages obviously is fading.

Critics and analysts have offered exhaustive commentaries on surveys showing that growing numbers of young Japanese now are opting for the single life over the responsibilities of marriage, that the ages at which both men and women marry for the first time continue to rise year by year and that many married couples are choosing to remain childless. Perhaps they should shift their focus to the more hopeful signs suggested by the Health and Welfare Ministry figures indicating that both marriages and births registered marginal increases in 1998. The number of marriages grew by some 16,000, to reach a total of 792,000. The figure for births was 1,206,000, a rise of some 14,000 over the previous year.