The Number Of Foreigners Soared By Nearly 3 Million People As Japan Recorded The Fastest Population Reduction Rate

Japanese woman illustration. (Unsplash/Maria Cassagne)

JAKARTA - Japan's population has decreased rapidly, while foreign population has risen to a record nearly 3 million people, government data said on Wednesday.

Data shows Japanese society is aging across the country, while on the other hand foreign nationals play an increasingly large role in covering the shrinking population.

The number of Japanese nationals has fallen for the 14th year, around 800,000 people, to 122.42 million, according to population registration data as of January 1, 2023, released by the Ministry of Home Affairs and Communications.

For the first time, Japan's population fell across all 47 prefectures, according to the data.

Meanwhile, the number of foreign nationals living in Japan reached a record 2.99 million, an increase of 10.7 percent from the previous year, the biggest increase year-on-year since the ministry began recording data a decade ago.

On January 1, 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic spread throughout the world, there were 2.87 million foreigners living in Japan.

In total, Japan's population has decreased by 511,000, to around 125.42 million people according to the latest data.

It is known that Japan's population continues to decline every year, after recording the highest number in 2008, due to a low birth rate with a record low recorded last year.

Terkait ini, Pemerintah Jepang bertujuan untuk mengatasi masalah ini dengan berbagai cara, termasuk mempekerjakan lebih banyak wanita, kata juru bicara pemerintah.

"To get a stable workforce, the government will encourage labor market reform to maximize employment opportunities for women, the elderly and others," said Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno, as reported by Reuters on July 26.

It is known that Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has made reversing the decline in the birth rate as his government's top priority, planning to allocate 3.5 trillion yen ($25 billion) per year for child care and other measures to support parents, despite high debt levels.

Last year, a group of Tokyo-based public think tank said Japan needed about four times more foreign workers by 2040 to achieve estimates of government economic growth.

Tokyo itself has the highest number of foreign population with 581,112 people or 4.2 percent of the total population of the nation's capital.