The Heisei Era, which will close in less than two weeks, witnessed an acceleration of the nation's demographic woes — the falling number of births and the rapidly aging and shrinking population. The demographic problem — which the government has come to describe as a national crisis — clouds Japan's future economic growth potential and casts doubt on the sustainability of the social security system. Efforts made over the years to reverse the trend appear to have achieved little. The challenge of coping with the aging and declining population will continue to be a priority in the Reiwa Era.
The year that the Heisei Era began, 1989, saw the birth of 1.24 million babies. That number dropped to an estimated 920,000 last year — a nearly 30 percent decline over 30 years. The number of newborns on record was the highest in 1949 at 2.69 million. During the early 1970s, when the children of the first postwar baby boomer generation were born, there were still more than 2 million babies born every year — before a long-term downtrend began. In 1975, the total fertility rate, indicating the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime, dipped below 2.0 — the level above which is deemed needed to maintain the population — and kept falling. The fertility rate fell to a record low of 1.26 in 2005 before gradually inching up in subsequent years to reach 1.43 in 2017. Since the number of women in the primary child-bearing age has already declined significantly, however, any modest recovery in the fertility rate is not expected to result in a substantial pickup in the number of newborns in the coming years.
The dramatic changes to the demographic picture over the past 30 years were evident in the latest population statistics released by the government this month. As of last October, Japan's total population, including foreign nationals, fell by 260,000 from the previous year to 126.44 million for eight consecutive year-on-year declines. Notable was the steep fall in the productive-age population made up of people aged 15 to 64, who constitute a key part of the nation's workforce. Their number fell by 510,000 to 75.45 million, accounting for 59.7 percent of the total population, the lowest since comparable data became available in 1950. Their share of the total population declined by roughly 10 percentage points from the peak in 1992 — and their numbers shrank by 11.81 million from 1995.