‘Fear and finances’: births in Japan predicted to fall below this year’s record low over coronavirus concerns

With the country’s birth rate already in alarming decline, the number of children born in Japan next year is now predicted to fall to a new low of below 800,000 as a result of worries over the Covid-19 pandemic.

The figures are based on pregnancies reported by local health authorities across the nation, and come on top of the health ministry’s announcement that it expected a record low of around 848,000 births this year – approximately 17,000 fewer than in 2019, and the lowest since such figures were first compiled in 1899.

There were 865,239 newborns in 2019, a number that caused renewed concern in the government as it was below the threshold of 900,000 for the first time.

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The dire prediction for 2021 from the Tokyo-based Japan Research Institute, a health care research and consulting firm, may be largely attributable to the pandemic, but it has once again caused alarm bells to ring in a country with an acute demographic crisis. In 2017, researchers at Tohoku University calculated that if population decline continued at the current rate, the Japanese people would go extinct in August 3766.

“There are clearly a number of reasons that have come together in 2020 to make the outlook for next year far worse than it was previously, but it essentially comes down to fear and finances,” said Yoko Tsukamoto, a professor of infection control at the Health Sciences University of Hokkaido.

“People see on the news what is happening with the pandemic, they know that people with the virus are being treated in hospitals, and they are just scared to get pregnant because they will need to regularly go to their [obstetrician and gynaecology] clinic,” she said. “They have heard the stories about people getting infected in hospitals and they fear the same thing could happen to them.

“The other issue is of money for raising a family, and although money worries have been a problem for couples – especially young couples – for some years now, those worries have become more severe this year because people are worried about losing their jobs or having their wages cut.”

Noriko Hama, a professor of economics at Kyoto’s Doshisha University, said most young couples had made the conscious decision that now was not the right time to try to start a family.

“It’s obviously a big step and people are frightened,” she said. “And if they were worried due to the financial pressures that were around last year, then they are going to be even more reluctant to try for children in the middle of a pandemic.”

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Inevitably, Hama points out, couples that delay having a child are going to be older and less likely to have another child in the future, meaning that there were likely to be longer-term repercussions as a result of the events of this year.

Japan’s population was 126.17 million in 2019, according to government statistics, down from a peak of 128 million a decade ago, while a study published by medical journal The Lancet before the pandemic predicted that the country’s total population would fall to 53 million by the end of the century.

For the past two decades, Japanese have been choosing to get married later in life and have fewer children, primarily due to financial pressures, while advances in medical care and technology mean they are living longer than ever before.

Life expectancy in Japan is now 84.1 years, but that large pool of elderly people requires pensions and medical care at a time when there are fewer young people going into the workforce and paying taxes to support them.

Successive governments have put forward suggestions for how the decline in the population might be halted or at least slowed, with new legislation providing paternity leave for new fathers and a degree of additional financial support. At the local level, towns and communities have tried to encourage couples to stay with the offer of cars and even homes, but limited job opportunities have increasingly seen younger people leave for the big cities.

Hama from Doshisha University said many Japanese couples would genuinely like to have larger families, but the financial pressures, particularly in uncertain economic times, were just too great.

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“The government seems to be able to come up with solutions that sound great – such as the ‘Go To Travel’ programme [to boost domestic tourism during the pandemic] – but it is quickly apparent that they’re just catchy phrases that have all too often not been completely thought through and they do not achieve what was promised,” she said.

“It’s the same with the measures they have proposed to encourage people to have more children. People really do not have a huge amount of confidence in the government any more and they know that, realistically, their plans are unlikely to pan out.”

Still, Hama does not consider a shrinking Japanese population to be a complete disaster.

“I don’t think it is such a bad thing to have fewer people each occupying a larger space,” she said. “It would be necessary to have an effective and efficient system, but fewer people does not automatically have to mean that there would be a decline in the quality of life for a population and, in fact, if may very well lead to the opposite and people leading more comfortable and ‘slower’ lives.”