I saw a news on Children's Day on May 5th about the latest number of children in Japan.

The number of children under 15 years old has been decreasing in the past 36 years in Japan, and the latest number is the lowest.

The percentage of the children under 15 years old in Japan is 12.4% and it's the lowest rate.
The number of babies born in 2016 in Japan was below a million.

We can obviously see from these numbers that Japan's aging population has not been stopped.
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photo by Shay


The percentage 12.4% is about half of that of the people over 65 years old.

In the comparison with the countries with the population over 40 million, the percentage of children among the whole population in Japan is the lowest while that of Italy, South Korea, Germany in 13%level.

The number of babies born in 2016 didn't reach a million for the first time ever since they started to record in 1899.

I actualy gave birth to my 2nd son in 2016 and I was somewhat surprised that he was one of that little number of new born babies.

The Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare says that they wanted to try to focus on the work style reforms to stop the decrease.


I am one of the mothers that currently have small children.
I feel like there are lots of children around me and my children, but when I carefully look around, there probably should be more sisters and brothers.

There seems to be more parents with only one child because of the financial and age situation.

I have two boys, but I really don't feel like having the third one because I think I'm already too old and the current Japanese family style doesn't allow us to have more than two children.

As everyone thinks, it's still a pretty tough issue.

However, I believe that it's a lot more serious situation than most of the people think.