RT | Thursday, June 11, 2026
Japan has fewer children than ever

In May, Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications released data showing that the number of children under the age of 15 in the Land of the Rising Sun had fallen to a new historic low: 13.29 million, which is 350,000 fewer than a year earlier. To understand the scale and drama of what is happening, it is worth recalling that in 1950*, at the very beginning of Japan’s economic miracle, children under 15 made up 35.1% of Japan’s population. Half a century later, in 2000, the share of children had declined to 14.5%. Alarm bells rang in the country, measures were introduced, but the trend could not be reversed. And now, according to the results of 2025, the share of children in the total population has once again hit a new low, falling to just 10.8%. The reduction of the number of children in Japanese society to what was once unthinkable is linked to falling birth rates, which in Japan are declining even faster than in the developed countries of America and Europe. The total fertility rate has fallen below 1.2 nationwide, while in Tokyo the average number of children per woman has dropped to just 0.99. In turn, the fall in fertility is connected with the continual decline in the number of marriages. Over 45 years of uninterrupted decline in the number of children, younger generations of Japanese have themselves become far smaller. More importantly, an increasing number of young Japanese do not want to start any family at all, or even maintain stable sexual relationships. And here we arrive at the root cause:..Read more