Japan, Short on Babies, Reaches a Worrisome Milestone Last year, the number of births in Japan dropped below one million for the first time, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said on Friday. Takaaki Tahara said that A lot of the things we’re used to in Japan are really products of an era of population growth, like single-breadwinner families and mandatory retirement ages, By JONATHAN SOBLEJUNE 2, 2017 TOKYO — Since Japan began counting its newborns more than a century ago, more than a million infants have been added to its population each year. The shrinking of the country’s population — deaths have outpaced births for several years — is already affecting the economy in areas including the job and housing markets, consumer spending and long-term investment plans at businesses. Demographers expect it to plunge by a third by 2060, to as few as 80 million people — a net loss of a million a year, on average. After Japan’s population hit a peak of 128 million at the start of the current decade, it shrank by close to a million in the five years through 2015, according to census data.
