Japan's population declined for the first time in almost a century in 2015, compounding the government' s concerns about the nation's mounting demographic woes in the face of a rapidly aging and shrinking society.
According to preliminary statistics released Friday by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications Statistics Bureau, Japan's population as of Oct. 1, 2015 totaled 127,110,047, a decline of 947,305 people, or 0.7 percent, from the previous census conducted in 2010.
The latest census revealed that the population in Japan had dropped for the first time since the survey began in 1920, and while Japan remains the world's 10th-largest country, is the only country among the top 20 whose population is declining.
The statistics bureau said Japan's male population stood at 61, 829,237 and its female population at 65,280,810, with the overall population dropping in 39 of Japan's total 47 prefectures.
Thirty three percent of the prefectures have seen an accelerated rate of decline, the bureau said. The data, while showing a population increase in Tokyo and some neighboring prefectures, also showed however that in four towns that were evacuated in Fukushima Prefecture in the wake of the nuclear disaster in 2011, half a decade ago, the population remained zero.
The Tohoku region in northeastern Japan which includes Fukushima, the worst-hit region after the 2011 quake and tsunami disasters, saw a total population decline of around 5 percent, the bureau's data also showed.
The government, under the stewardship of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, is grappling to address the demographic crisis with structural reform policies aimed at boosting the rapidly declining national fertility rate, which fell to a record low of 1.42 in 2014, well below the 2.1 threshold that sees countries' populations maintained or increase.
Japan's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research has said the declining birthrate will lead to the nation losing one-third of its population by 2060, while the United Nations has said it expects the population to shrink to 83 million by 2100.
The latest census also showed that the number of people in a household fell to 2.38 in the recording period, a record-low and evidence that the average size of Japanese families is also decreasing. The knock-on effect of the slumping birthrate will be a drop in gross national income, which accounts for around 15 percent of the global total to 5.2 percent in 2050 and 1.7 percent in 2100, economists have estimated.
The Abe-led administration is also trying to contend with a rapidly graying society, one of the fastest in the world, with people over 65 years old now accounting for 27 percent of the population and set to surge to around 39.9 by 2060.
"It is crucial to establish a social structure to accommodate the decline," said Abe's top spokesperson, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, Friday, while also reiterating the government's intentions to address the crisis, without adding specifics.
Abe instated Liberal Democratic Party member Katsunobu Kato as the "minister for 100 million active people," and the lower house member has been charged with instituting strategies to raise the nation's birthrate to 1.8 children per woman to achieve this, which, as experts have pointed out, based on the latest census and simulations over the coming decades, is, in fact, numerically impossible.
Keio University's demographics specialist, professor Noriko Tsuya, has said there is no other industrialized country in the world that is experiencing such a rapid decline of its population.
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