The prospect that the number of newborns in Japan this year will fall below 900,000 — only three years after dipping below the 1 million mark — comes as little surprise. While the nation's fertility rate remains close to its historic low, the number of women of primary child-bearing ages has already declined significantly as a result of the long-term trend of ever-fewer births. The annual number of babies born in this country will likely continue to fall.
In its efforts to address the rapidly aging and declining population, the government calls for measures to improve the social conditions for young couples to raise children — so that they can marry and have kids as they wish. Such steps should be steadily implemented. At the same time, the government needs to start reviewing the social security system — whose sustainability depends heavily on the younger generation — and other policies on the assumption that it's tough to reverse the accelerating aging of the population.
Officials say there will be fewer than 870,000 babies born in Japan in 2019 — down from 918,400 last year. The number of newborns in the first nine months of 2019 fell by 5.6 percent from the same period last year — a rate of decline twice as fast as in 2018. The forecast for 2019 is roughly 50,000 fewer than the estimate given only two years ago by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, which then predicted that the number of newborns will dip below 900,000 in 2021. These figures show that the aging of the population is accelerating even faster than was earlier assumed.