A third of 18-year-old women in Japan may never have children, finds study

About a third of 18-year-old women in Japan may never have children, a government institute in the world’s third-largest economy said in the latest data, reported Reuters. The country is facing a dwindling population. The National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (IPSS) estimated in a report that 33.4% of women born in 2005 would be childless. The IPSS determines the expected percentage of childless women by taking into account factors such as age of marriage in estimating the fertility rate.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in June promised to tackle the population crisis with “unprecedented” measures including bigger payouts for families with three or more children. The number of babies born in Japan and to Japanese expatriates in the January to June period fell 3.6 percent from a year earlier to 371,052, latest government data showed.

“With the rising cost of living, I don’t think people feel they can afford to or comfortably say they want to have children,” 23-year-old Anna Tanaka told Reuters. The number of children in Japan has been falling for more than four decades, surveys show.

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Miho Iwasawa, the IPSS’s director of population dynamics research, said people getting married at later age is also leading to a decline in births. Marrying in one’s late-30s often results in just one child, if any, Iwasawa said. People choosing to not marry at all can also be a contributing factor.

In 2020, women got married for the first time at an average age of 29.4, which is 3.9 years later than in 1985, government data shows. This can lead to a trend of fewer children begetting fewer children.

With fewer children, parents are able to spend more on each child, compared to families in the past. Higher average cost of raising a child is putting some people off from having children, as per reports.

Cost of a child's education is also an important factor. Tuition at private universities in Japan jumped five-fold between 1975 and 2021, and by 19 times at public universities, data shows. Japan’s population of 126.15 million in 2020 is projected to fall to 87 million by 2070, IPSS said.

The number of annual births in Japan dipped below 800,000 for the first time in 2022, reported Al Jazeera. The current birth rate in the country is 1.34, which is well below the 2.07 necessary to keep the population stable. According to data, trends and estimates, Japan’s population could drop from 125 million to 88 million by 2065.