Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
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.
Demographics experts, basing their calculations on preliminary data for the first 10 months of the year, expect that the total number of births of Japanese babies for 2025 is likely to come in below 670,000.
That would be the lowest level since records began in 1899, and 16 years earlier than projected by government forecasts.
The experts warned that such a tally would be significantly lower than the government’s medium variant forecast for annual births, the core set of projections that are used as the basis for fiscal and economic planning.
Those estimates, compiled by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research and last updated in 2023, had pointed to 749,000 Japanese babies born in 2025. The same projections had suggested the number of births would not fall below 670,000 until 2041.
A sub-670,000 figure would even be well below the government’s most downbeat “low variant” forecasts, which predicted about 681,000 births for 2025.
The expected 2025 birth figures, which exclude children born to foreign residents, are likely to deepen a sense of emergency over Japan’s falling native population.
Meanwhile, public resistance to increasing foreign inflows is growing, reflected in the recent electoral successes of immigration-sceptic populist parties.
In late November, Takaichi chaired the first meeting of the Population Strategy Headquarters, a government task force she established to address what she described as the country’s “biggest problem”.
In 2024, Japan allocated about $23bn to a three-year effort aimed at reversing the falling birth rate.
The number of annual marriages in Japan — where births outside of marriage is rare — has fallen to less than 500,000, about half the peak in 1972. With annual deaths also rising, the Japanese population shrank by just over 900,000 people in 2024.
Masakazu Yamauchi, a demographer at Waseda University, said that the birth total for 2025, which should be confirmed by preliminary figures due for release early next year, was likely to represent a 3 per cent drop from 686,000 in 2024. That would mark the 10th consecutive year of record-low births.
Economists, academics and opposition politicians have urged the government to accept that Japan’s demographics are now trending more closely to the pessimistic forecasts, and revise their projections and planning.
But doing so would amount to an admission that years of government efforts to raise the birth rate have proven futile, and that higher taxes and lower pension benefits would be inevitable, said Masatoshi Kikuchi, chief equity strategist at Mizuho Securities.
Demographers are also pondering the possible birth rate effects of 2026 being a hinouma, or “fire horse”, year in the Japanese astrological calendar.
Superstitions about girls born in “fire horse” years caused births to fall by 25 per cent in 1966, the last such year in the 60-year cycle, before rebounding to the trend rate in 1967.
Takashi Inoue, a demographer at Aoyama Gakuin University downplayed the impact of the “fire horse” superstition for 2026, saying young Japanese no longer paid such things much attention.
“I always teach about the 1966 year in my [demographics] classes, but most students are unaware of it,” said Inoue. “For today’s young people living in the age of IT and AI, even if they learn about the horse year, they see it as a piece of history.”
“I don’t think it will have much of an impact on their marriage or childbirth behaviour.”
