According to a report by the Japan News Agency, the preliminary population statistics released by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare on the 28th showed that the number of newborns born in the first half of 2026 (January to June) increased by 0.8% (2788 people), reaching 34,206.8 thousand. This is the first increase in the number of births in the first half of the year since 2015, eleven years after that time. The reason may be that the number of marriages, which affects the number of births, has been increasing for two consecutive years, in 2024 and 2025.
According to reports, despite an increase in the number of births, the number of people below 400,000 remains lower for the fifth consecutive year, indicating that the trend towards a low birth rate continues.
However, the continuous rapid decline in the number of births seems to have reached a bottom. The number of births in Japan dropped by nearly 6% in 2021, and since then, the decline has remained within the range of 3% to about 5%. The decline will be 3.1% by 2025.
