Japan’s birth rate continues to plummet, with a new report showing a dip for the ninth year running. That’s led Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru to lament in a Diet session that young people just don’t have the opportunity to meet and marry like they used to. However, he stopped short of offering any specific plans to address the issue.
PM regrets the death of omiai
As reported by Jiji, preliminary numbers from Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) show the country’s number of births dropped to 729,880 in 2024. That’s a dip of 37,643 from the previous year, or a full 5%. If this keeps up, in another year, the number of new kids born in Japan could well drop below 700,000.
Addressing this dire situation at a budget committee meeting in the Diet’s Lower House, Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru said the problem is due to a “striking drop” in the opportunities that men and women have to meet and get married.
“The government shouldn’t interfere with people’s values,” he stressed, according to FNN Prime Online. (Glad we won’t be seeing The Handmaid’s Tale enacted in Japan anytime soon.) “But the government needs to consider in what ways we can create opportunities for people to meet.”
“As the marriage rate dips, we’re seeing the population drop along with it.”
Ishiba also called out the drop in the tradition of omiai (お見合い), in which couples are introduced formally to one another to entertain the possibility of marriage by a professional matchmaker. (Omiai is sometimes mistranslated as “arranged marriages,” but they’re not involuntary.)
Indeed, as Sankei covered last year, dating apps have taken a hammer to the traditional matchmaking business. In 2023, more matchmaking businesses went bust than ever. Statistics show that one in four couples these days use apps to find one another.
So what’s the solution?
Ishiba didn’t offer a lot of solutions at the meeting, however. He did allude to addressing the issue of temporary workers – i.e., all workers who are on contract and working full-time or part-time. Noting the marriage rate is lower among temporary workers, he suggested either raising their rates or making it possible for some who don’t want to work to quit – presumably by marrying.
The thing is, the government has already intervened in marriage in Japan. The country began a program in 2020 to help local governments create AI-fueled matchmaking apps. Tokyo took advantage of the funds to create an app that requests a ton of personal information in order to screen out the unserious.
The efforts may be working. The MHLW report says that the marriage rate increased last year by 2.2% – the second year in a row that marriages went up.
Of course, just because people are getting married doesn’t mean they want to have kids. Some surveys show that, beyond economic concerns, many women are concerned that balancing career and child-rearing in Japan is difficult, as the burden falls largely on their shoulders. Multiple other studies show that married women in Japan do the majority of housework, with their male partners doing around a fifth of what they do.
Perhaps, in addition to increasing opportunities to meet, the government should also encourage men to be less useless.
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