The Children and Families Agency (こども家庭庁, Kodomo Katei-chō) was established in April 2023 under then-PM Kishida Fumio as a centralized body for child and family policy. Its FY2026 budget is 7.5 trillion yen, with about 80% allocated to direct family payments — the universal child allowance, parental leave benefits, the 100,000 yen pregnancy bonus — and to operating costs for daycare and after-school care facilities. The remainder funds the agency’s planning, research, and grants to outside organizations.
The agency turned three this April. The birth rate did not turn around: 2025 saw 705,809 births, the tenth consecutive year of record lows, with a total fertility rate of 1.13. Critics on social media — overwhelmingly from the political right — have argued that this proves the agency is wasteful or harmful, sometimes calling for its complete dissolution under the hashtag #こども家庭庁解体. The same critics rarely acknowledge that most of the 7.5 trillion yen is direct support to households (which would still need to be paid through some other ministry if the agency were dissolved), and the dissolution movement has not been measured in any mainstream opinion poll, NHK or otherwise. As Nikkei and other mainstream outlets have noted, the ‘dissolution argument’ is largely an online-right phenomenon.
It was into this discourse that Mihara — a former Children’s Policy Minister and now LDP committee chair — stepped on April 27. Asked in the Diet about SNS calls for the agency’s dissolution, she said: ‘Each policy matters. None of them can simply be eliminated.’ PM Takaichi backed her up: ‘The view that the Children and Families Agency leads coordination and pursues comprehensive policy is extremely important.’ The replies they received online suggest they have not won over the right.
A note on sources. We sampled 740 replies across two threads about the same news event: Sankei Shimbun’s straight-news post (372 replies, ~17,900 likes) and the far-right aggregator HoshuSokuhou (368 replies, ~7,200 likes). Both lean right, but they are not the same — Sankei is a mainstream conservative newspaper read by older, suburban, business-aligned conservatives, while HoshuSokuhou is an aggregator account that explicitly curates content for the online far right. Reading both lets us see what’s common to right-wing X (a near-universal demand for dissolution) and what differs (the Sankei thread leans more on private-sector accountability and corruption framings, while HoshuSokuhou leans more on outright outrage and ‘send programs back to MHLW’ technocratic reform). What we cannot tell from this dataset is what mainstream or left-leaning Japanese think about こども家庭庁, because they are essentially absent from both threads.
the agency (of 740)
family payments
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The dominant frame, accounting for just over half of all engagement, is results-based: the agency is three years old, the budget keeps rising, the birth rate keeps falling, therefore the agency is a failure. Many replies use private-sector accountability framing — ‘a private company would have been dissolved by now’ or ‘the people responsible would have been fired.’ This frame is more concentrated in the HoshuSokuhou aggregator thread (64% of engagement there) than in Sankei (46%). HoshuSokuhou’s commenters are more likely to call the agency itself worthless; Sankei’s commenters are more likely to grant that the underlying programs matter while attacking the wrapper.
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The frame deliberately collapses the distinction between the agency as an administrative body and the broader population trend it can plausibly affect. Japan’s birth rate has been declining for decades; few demographers think any agency, regardless of structure, could reverse the trajectory inside three years. The dissolution argument doesn’t engage with this; it treats the steady decline as proof of the agency’s failure.
The second-largest frame, dominant in the Sankei thread (35% of engagement), recasts the agency as a vested-interest (利権) structure designed to skim public funds (公金チューチュー — ‘public-money sucking’) for politically connected NPOs and consultants. Specific names recur: NPO Florence (a child-poverty charity that has received significant CFA funding) is criticized as a representative case. Mihara herself is attacked as the embodiment of this dynamic.
‘Magic mallet’ (打ち出の小槌) imagery — a folktale device that produces gold on demand — appears across the thread to describe how the right perceives the agency: a budget line that grows for political reasons rather than to solve a problem. The frame is more emotionally charged in HoshuSokuhou, more institutional in Sankei, but the underlying claim is the same.
About 15% of engagement, slightly more concentrated in Sankei (16.5%) than HoshuSokuhou (9.8%) by share, recasts the agency as an instrument of population substitution: ‘It’s an agency for increasing foreign children, isn’t it?’ The framing repurposes recent news incidents — including a documented case in which child allowance payments were sent in error to foreign nationals who had already left Japan — into a broader narrative that the agency exists primarily to subsidize non-Japanese families.
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This frame appears across both sources but with somewhat different rhetoric: HoshuSokuhou commenters tend to use blunt or dehumanizing language about foreign children, while Sankei commenters more often frame it as a budget-allocation complaint (‘don’t use Japanese tax money on foreign children’). The underlying anxiety, drawing on the ‘great replacement’ frame that has spread across Japanese right-wing online discourse, is the same.
A small but distinctive theme, more present in HoshuSokuhou (8.5% of engagement there, vs. 1.4% in Sankei): the technocratic-reform position that the agency’s underlying programs are mostly fine, but should be returned to the ministries that handled them before 2023 — primarily the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare and the Cabinet Office, with some functions to MEXT. As one commenter on HoshuSokuhou put it: ‘Don’t need it. Send it back to MHLW and the Cabinet Office. The roles aren’t unnecessary — the ‘agency’ (chō) is unnecessary.’
This is the closest thing to a moderate-conservative position in the dataset. It accepts that the underlying programs (child allowance, parental leave) need to exist while rejecting the centralized agency structure as duplicative. Notably, this position is rare in the Sankei thread, where the dominant Sankei frame is corruption rather than administrative reform.
Across 740 replies, four voices offered any explicit defense of the Children and Families Agency. The most-liked, with 239 likes, came from Sankei reader @09_anq: ‘Are the people saying “get rid of こども家庭庁” saying this budget isn’t needed? If so they’re nothing but enemies of child-rearing households.’ Another Sankei commenter offered the most institutionally substantive defense: ‘Wholesale abolition of the agency’s programs would mean something, but just returning each program to its original ministry would be less efficient and harder to manage. Even if the agency needs reform or improvement, calling for abolition is extreme.’
It is essentially impossible to know from these threads what proportion of the broader Japanese public agrees. The mainstream Japanese press has not run formal opinion polling on the dissolution question. Voters who would defend the agency on welfare-state grounds — a substantial share of left-of-center Japan — appear to be largely absent from these threads, either because they don’t follow Sankei or HoshuSokuhou or because they have nothing to gain from engaging in the pile-on. The numbers in this analysis tell us about the right-wing online conversation, not about Japan.
