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The number of Japanese births this year is on track to fall short of even the government’s most pessimistic forecasts, deepening the challenge for Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi as she seeks to balance economic growth and limits on immigration with a rapidly shrinking population.
Demographers, basing their calculations on preliminary data from the first 10 months of the year, expect the total number of Japanese baby births in 2025 to fall below 670,000.
This would be the lowest level since records began in 1899, and 16 years earlier than government forecasts had predicted.
Experts warned that such a number would be significantly lower than the government’s medium version forecast for annual births, the main set of projections used as the basis for fiscal and economic planning.
Those projections, compiled by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research and last updated in 2023, pointed to 749,000 Japanese baby births in 2025. The same projections suggested that the number of births would not fall below 670,000 by 2041.
A figure of less than 670,000 would be well below even the government’s most gloomy “low version” forecasts, which predicted around 681,000 births for 2025.
Expected 2025 birth figures, which exclude children born to foreign residents, are likely to deepen the sense of emergency JapanDeclining native population.
Meanwhile, public resistance to increased foreign flows is growing, reflected in the recent electoral successes of immigration-skeptic populist parties.
In late November, Takachi chaired the first meeting of the Population Strategy Headquarters, a government task force he established to address what he described as the country’s “biggest problem”.
In 2024, Japan allocated about $23 billion for a three-year effort aimed at reversing the falling birth rate.
The number of annual marriages in Japan – where birth outside marriage is rare – has fallen to less than 500,000, about half the peak in 1972. The Japanese population is set to decline by more than 900,000 in 2024, with annual deaths also increasing.
Masakazu Yamauchi, a demographer at Waseda University, said total births for 2025, which should be confirmed by preliminary data to be released early next year, are likely to represent a 3 percent decline from 686,000 in 2024. This will be the 10th consecutive year of record-low births.
Economists, academics and opposition politicians have urged the government to acknowledge that Japan’s demographics are now moving closer to pessimistic forecasts, and revise its projections and planning.
But doing so would be an admission that years of government efforts to raise the birth rate have proven futile, and higher taxes and lower pension benefits will be inevitable, said Masatoshi Kikuchi, chief equity strategist at Mizuho Securities.
Demographers are also considering potential birth rate impacts in 2026 Hinoumaor “Fire Horse”, year in the Japanese astrological calendar.
Superstitions about girls being born in “Fire Horse” years led to a 25 percent decline in the birth rate in 1966, the last such year in the 60-year cycle, before returning to trend rate in 1967.
Takashi Inoue, a demographer at Aoyama Gakuin University, downplayed the impact of the “fire horse” superstition for 2026, saying that young Japanese no longer pay much attention to such things.
“I always teach about the year 1966 in my (demography) classes, but most students are unaware of it,” Inoue said. “For today’s young people living in the age of IT and AI, even when they learn about the Year of the Horse, they see it as a piece of history.”
“I don’t think it will have much of an impact on their marriage or childbearing behavior.”
