Nobody in Japan wants to have kids.
Japan’s birthrate has fallen to the lowest in history, the Guardian reports. 921,000 babies were born in 2018, which is the lowest number on record since 1899. This is also the third year in a row that the total birth number is below one million. To keep the population stable, the government wanted the average number of children a woman has to be 1.8 by April 2026, but that’s not going to happen with the birth rate decreasing, with it now standing at 1.43.
This has been a concern for years now, with so many reasons why Japanese people just aren’t having kids. Studies in the past decade or so have found that young Japanese people are growing increasingly disinterested in sex, and even the Japanese government has tried to intervene to get people to couple up with local governments hosting dating events. There’s also a shortage of child care facilities in Japan, so it can be hard for working women to return to their jobs after having children, and bad economic prospects for men mean that people aren’t getting married and starting families at the same rates.
But you know who just keep sticking around? Old people. Life expectancy for Japanese women is 87.2 and 81.01 the Guardian reports and with 20% of the population 70 and older, Japan has the highest population of old people in the world.