Child population down for 37th straight year

May 5, 2018

Tokyo- The population of children under 15 years old in Japan stood at an estimated 15.53 million as of April 1, down 170,000 from a year earlier and falling for the 37th consecutive year, the internal affairs ministry said Friday.

The child population rewrote a low since 1950, when comparable data became available, the ministry said before Children's Day on Saturday.

According to the latest data, boys totaled 7.95 million and girls 7.58 million, accounting for 12.3 percent of the overall population on a combined basis. The proportion of children dropped 0.1 percentage point, down for 44 years in a row.

The number of children aged 12 to 14 stood at 3.26 million, followed by 3.23 million for the age range of 9-11, 3.13 million for 6-8, 2.98 million for 3-5 and 2.93 million for the youngest range.

Among the country's 47 prefectures, only Tokyo saw its child population rise, by 7,000 to 1,542,000 as of Oct. 1, 2017. Besides Tokyo, Kanagawa, Aichi and Osaka had over one million children.

Other prefecture-by-prefecture data showed that children's population share was the highest in Okinawa, at 17.1 percent, followed by Shiga, with a 14.1 percent share, and Saga, with 13.7 percent. Meanwhile, the three lowest figures were Akita's 10.1 percent, Aomori's 11 percent and Hokkaido's 11.1 percent. Jiji Press