Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on Monday that Japan’s low birth rate and aging population are threatening the functioning of Japanese society and vowed to tackle the problem through a new government agency.
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“Tackling the issue of child policy and child-rearing” is a project “that cannot wait and cannot be postponed,” the Conservative leader said during a keynote speech before Parliament.
“Due to the rapid decline in the birth rate, the annual number of births is estimated to have fallen below 800,000 in the past year,” he added.
For this reason, Japan is “on the verge of inability to continue functioning as a society,” the prime minister also noted.
Mr Kishida said his policies – which include the creation of a new “Child and Family Agency” next April – aim to ensure the “viability” and “inclusiveness” of the world’s third largest economy.
The Japanese prime minister added that he ultimately wants to double spending on children’s programming. “We need to build a social economy that puts children first,” he said.
Many developed countries are seeing their fertility rates fall, but the trend is particularly pronounced in Japan, which is experiencing a population decline and has the second-highest proportion of people aged 65 and over worldwide after Monaco, data shows the Bank.
Japan, which has a population of 125 million, dedicates a large part of its resources to the growing number of elderly people.
Birth rates are falling, including in the archipelago’s neighbors, including China, where the population actually fell in 2022 for the first time in six decades, according to data released last week.