Number of newborn babies rises in Japan for the first time since 2010 - but population still in decline

The estimated number of newborn babies in Japan in 2015 rose by around 4,000 from the previous year to 1,008,000, marking the first increase since 2010, the health ministry said.

The ministry’s estimates also showed the number of people who died in 2015 totaled 1,302,000, up 29,000 from a year earlier. As a result, the natural population decline, calculated by deducting the number of deaths from that of births, stood at a record 294,000.

The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare attributed the rise to an improvement in employment conditions and government efforts to boost day care services as well as an increase in the number of births among women in their early 30s in the first half of 2015.

But the overall trend of a decline in the number of children is expected to continue with a fall in the population of women of reproductive age.

The number of newborn babies, which hit more than 2 million annually in the 1970s, dropped below 1.5 million in 1984 and below 1.1 million in 2005, the health ministry data showed.

On the other hand, the number of deaths topped 1.3 million for the first time in 2015, resulting in a natural population decline for the ninth consecutive year. The top four leading causes of death in the country were cancer, heart disease, pneumonia and cerebrovascular disease.