Japan’s Population Crisis: What Happens When a Country Stops Having Children
By Yoshi | Japan Unveiled
I want to begin with a number that I find simultaneously familiar and staggering.
Japan’s population in 2024 was approximately 124 million. Japan’s population in 2070 — if current demographic trends continue without significant change from immigration or fertility recovery — is projected to be approximately 87 million.
That is a decline of approximately 37 million people — roughly the current population of Canada — in less than fifty years.
I live in this country. I have lived in this country for my entire life. I have watched, across the past several decades, the specific ways in which this demographic trajectory is becoming visible in the physical and social landscape — the empty schools in mountain villages, the shuttered shops in regional town centres, the specific demographic composition of the trains and the streets and the workplaces that is becoming visibly older with each passing year.
The population crisis is not a future problem in Japan. It is a present reality that is already reshaping every dimension of Japanese society, and that will continue to reshape it in ways that are both more dramatic and more consequential than most international coverage suggests.
The Numbers: Understanding the Scale
Japan’s fertility rate — the average number of children born per woman — has been below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman since 1975. It has been declining almost continuously since then, reaching approximately 1.2 in recent years — among the lowest fertility rates of any country on earth.
The mathematics of below-replacement fertility are specific: each generation is smaller than the one before it. The generation born in the 1990s is smaller than the generation born in the 1970s. The generation currently being born is smaller still. Without significant offsetting — through immigration or a dramatic fertility recovery — the population will continue to shrink and age.
The aging dimension: as fertility has declined, life expectancy has increased. Japan has among the longest life expectancies in the world — approximately 87 years for women, 81 for men. The combination of fewer births and longer lives produces a population that is aging rapidly: the proportion of Japan’s population over 65 was approximately 29% as of 2023 — the highest proportion of any country in the world. By 2040, it is projected to exceed 35%.
The specific challenge this creates: a smaller working-age population must support a larger elderly population through taxes, social insurance, and family care. The demographic ratio — the number of working-age adults per retiree — is deteriorating rapidly. The pension and healthcare systems designed for a younger population are under significant pressure.
Why This Happened: The Causes Are Specific
The Japanese fertility decline has specific causes that are worth understanding because they are not universal human tendencies but specific products of Japanese social and economic structure.
The cost of education and child-rearing. Japan’s education culture — the supplementary cram school (juku) system, the high expectations for university attendance, the specific costs of raising children to the educational standards that Japanese social competition demands — makes child-rearing extremely expensive. The calculation that many young Japanese couples make — consciously or unconsciously — is that they can afford one child at the standard they feel obligated to provide, but not two or three.
Women’s limited workplace options. Japan’s workforce has historically been structured around a model that assumes most workers — specifically most male workers — have a full-time homemaker managing the domestic and childcare responsibilities. Women who enter the professional workforce face a specific structural choice: a demanding career that is incompatible with the level of childcare involvement Japanese parenting culture requires, or stepping back from career advancement to accommodate childcare. Many women are choosing careers over children, or choosing not to marry at all, in response to a system that has not yet made both fully compatible.
The marriage-birth link. Japan has an extraordinarily high proportion of births within marriage — approximately 98% of Japanese children are born to married couples, compared to 30-40% in many European countries. This means that the declining marriage rate drives the declining birth rate almost directly. And the marriage rate has been declining for decades, driven by economic precarity among young men (the freeter generation of irregular workers who feel unable to support a family), by changing relationship norms among young women, and by the specific social pressures of Japanese work culture that make establishing and maintaining a relationship alongside a demanding job difficult.
What It Looks Like on the Ground
The demographic crisis is not an abstract statistical phenomenon. It is visible in specific ways throughout Japan, and particularly in the regions that have been most severely affected.
The empty school. Rural Japan has been losing students from its schools for decades as families move to cities. Schools that once served several hundred students now serve dozens. Schools that served dozens have closed. The specific building — the school building with its empty corridors and its locked gymnasium and its playground equipment rusting in the unmown grass — is one of the most common forms of haikyo in contemporary Japan.
In 2023, Japan had approximately 9,000 fewer elementary schools than it had in 1995 — a reduction of approximately 20% driven entirely by declining enrollment. The consolidation of rural schools — the merging of multiple small school populations into a single larger school, requiring children to travel longer distances — is a daily reality for rural families and a visible marker of demographic decline.
The shrinking town. Japan has approximately 1,800 municipalities. Of these, approximately 800 are designated by the government as *消滅可能性自治体 (municipalities with potential for disappearance) — communities whose projected population decline is severe enough that their continued existence as functioning local governments is uncertain. Many of these are small, rural communities whose populations are already predominantly elderly and whose birth rates have effectively ceased.
The specific experience of living in a shrinking town is something I have observed through relatives who live in areas of central Japan outside the major cities: the closing of the local supermarket (not enough customers), the closing of the local bank branch (replaced by an ATM), the closing of the local medical clinic (the doctor retired and no replacement was found), the gradual transformation of the main street into a row of shuttered storefronts.
The empty house epidemic. Japan has approximately 9 million akiya (abandoned homes) — vacant properties throughout the country, many in rural areas where population decline has left them without buyers or tenants. The akiya number is growing, and the legal and practical challenges of dealing with abandoned properties — unclear ownership, inheritance complications, demolition costs — mean that many of these empty houses simply deteriorate in place, becoming the haikyo I have written about elsewhere.
The Government Response: What Has Been Tried
The Japanese government has been aware of the demographic crisis for decades and has implemented various policy responses, with limited success.
Child-rearing support expansion — increased childcare capacity (Japan had a severe daycare waiting list problem — taiki jidō mondai — that forced many parents to choose between work and childcare), increased parental leave entitlements for both parents, and financial incentives for families with children. These measures have been meaningful but insufficient.
Rural revitalisation programs — the chihou sōsei (regional revitalisation) initiative launched in 2014 provided funding and policy support for rural communities attempting to reverse population decline through economic development, remote work infrastructure, and migration incentives. The results have been mixed: a small number of communities have succeeded in attracting younger residents, but the overall rural population decline has continued.
Immigration — the conversation Japan is not quite having. Japan’s response to demographic decline through immigration has been remarkably limited by the standards of other developed countries facing similar challenges. The legal immigration system has historically been extremely restrictive — the number of people accepted as permanent residents annually is small — and the social integration infrastructure for immigrant populations is underdeveloped.
This is changing, slowly. Japan has expanded its Technical Intern Training Program (widely criticised for permitting labour exploitation) and more recently its Specified Skilled Worker program, which allows workers in designated industries to work in Japan for longer periods. The number of foreign residents in Japan has been growing — reaching approximately 3 million, or approximately 2.4% of the population — but remains far below the proportion that other developed countries have used to offset domestic demographic decline.
The political resistance to significant immigration is real and deep, and the social integration challenges facing the existing foreign resident population suggest that rapid expansion of immigration, even if politically feasible, would require substantial investment in integration infrastructure that is currently absent.
What This Means for Japan’s Future
I want to be direct about what the demographic trajectory means for the Japan that currently exists.
The Japan of 2070 — with 87 million people, with a median age significantly higher than today’s already-high figure, with a much higher proportion of elderly dependents — will be a substantially different country from the Japan of 2024. Some of these differences are already visible and will intensify. Others are projected outcomes that may or may not materialise depending on policy choices that have not yet been made.
The most likely changes: further consolidation of population into major urban centres, with accelerating rural decline. Significant labour shortages in industries that cannot easily be automated. Increased reliance on automation and artificial intelligence as labour force substitutes. Some degree of forced reckoning with immigration as a demographic tool, even if the reckoning arrives slowly and incompletely.
The less certain: whether Japanese society will adapt creatively to its demographic constraints — as some economic analysts suggest, pointing to Japan’s track record of productivity improvement — or whether the demographic decline will produce sustained economic contraction that the adaptations cannot fully offset.
I live in this country. I will live in it through some portion of this transition. I have children and, eventually, grandchildren who will live through more of it. The question of what Japan will be in the decades ahead is not an abstract policy question for me. It is a question about the specific place where the people I love will live their lives.
The answer is uncertain. The uncertainty is honest.
— Yoshi 📉 Central Japan, 2026
Enjoyed this? You might also like: “Japan’s Aging Society: What It’s Like to Live in the World’s Oldest Country” and “Why Japanese Women Are Leaving: The Gender Gap Nobody Wants to Talk About” — both available on Japan Unveiled.
