Japan braces for demographic crunch with 2025 births falling to lowest level since 1899

Japan’s 2025 birthrate drops below 670,000, lowest since 1899

Japan is on track to record its lowest number of births since records began in 1899, with preliminary data for the first 10 months of 2025 suggesting fewer than 670,000 Japanese babies will be born this year.

This figure would fall below even the government’s most pessimistic forecasts, posing a significant challenge for Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi as she grapples with economic growth, immigration limits, and a rapidly shrinking population.

Demographics experts warn that the projected tally is well below the government’s medium-variant forecast of 749,000 births, which forms the basis for fiscal and economic planning. Even the low-variant forecast, which anticipated 681,000 births for 2025, is now expected to be surpassed, marking a 16-year acceleration in the decline compared with prior projections.

Marriage rates in Japan have also dropped sharply, falling below 500,000 in 2025, about half the peak recorded in 1972. With annual deaths rising, the Japanese population contracted by over 900,000 people in 2024.

Masakazu Yamauchi, a demographer at Waseda University, said, “The birth total for 2025…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 and academics have urged the government to revise its projections, acknowledging that demographic trends align more closely with pessimistic forecasts. However, doing so would imply that previous government efforts to raise the birth rate have failed, potentially resulting in higher taxes and reduced pension benefits, warned Masatoshi Kikuchi, chief equity strategist at Mizuho Securities.

Some demographers have also considered whether the 2026 “fire horse” year, or hinouma, known historically for a sharp decline in births, could influence trends.

Takashi Inoue of Aoyama Gakuin University dismissed the superstition’s relevance for today’s youth, saying, “I always teach about the 1966 year in my [demographics] classes, but most students are unaware of it…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.”

Meanwhile, Japan’s demographic decline contrasts with the global population surge. Cities such as Jakarta, Indonesia, now surpass Tokyo as the world’s most populous urban area, with around 42 million residents, partly due to UN adjustments in measuring urban populations. Delhi’s population is estimated to be close to 30 million, though exact figures remain uncertain due to India’s last census being in 2011.

Japan’s record-low births underline the country’s urgent demographic challenge, highlighting the widening gap between economic planning assumptions and the reality of a rapidly aging, shrinking population.