The country has had nine consecutive years of declining births despite government efforts to halt the demographic crisis
It was a story of extraordinary national renewal. After decades in the grip of military imperial rule, millions dead in a war that traversed oceans and two cities flattened by atom bombs, the Japanese people picked themselves up and made babies.
Between 1945 and 1965, a nascent democracy flourished, the economy boomed and Japan’s population rocketed from 72 million to almost 100 million. By the turn of the millennium, the mountainous archipelago, the vast majority of whose population is squeezed into lower-lying coastal areas, was home to 127 million people, four times the population of Canada, which is 26 times larger.
