For a country that has grown used to record lows, even a fraction of a percent counts as news. Japanese nationals living in Japan had 320,458 babies between January and June 2026, up 0.4 percent on the same months of last year, according to health ministry data reported by Kyodo News on Wednesday. It is the first time in 11 years that the first-half figure has gone up rather than down.
Preliminary numbers that also include children of foreign residents show 342,068 births, an increase of 0.8 percent. Specialists put the small improvement down mainly to the fact that more couples tied the knot in 2024 and again in 2025. Because very few Japanese children are born outside marriage, the marriage count is watched closely as an early signal of where births are heading.
Nobody is calling it a turnaround yet. The full-year total is expected to land close to 2025, when births to Japanese parents fell to about 671,000, the lowest since records began in 1899 and the tenth record low in a row, while the average number of children per woman sank to 1.14. Back in 1973, at the post-war peak, Japan welcomed 2.09 million babies in a single year.
The other side of the ledger is harsher. Over those same six months, deaths reached 778,982, outnumbering births by almost 437,000. People aged 65 or older now make up a record 29.4 percent of the population, straining pensions, health care and the labour market.
Tokyo has expanded child allowances and parental-leave benefits and describes the years up to the early 2030s as a “last chance” to change course. The scale of the challenge is clear from an official projection made in 2023, which did not expect annual births to drop below 680,000 until around 2040. That line has already been crossed.
