An adviser to Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida stated that the country will disappear if it continues to “carry on like this,” referring to its low birth rates.
Masako Mori was speaking in an interview just days after Japan announced data showing that the number of kids born in 2017 plummeted to a historic low, after a seven-year trend of declining birth rates (the number of births per 1,000 people in a population in a year).
Japan announced earlier on February 28 that the number of babies born in the country last year dropped to a historic low. Last year, as many as 1.58 million people died while only half of it, that is 8,00,000 births took place.
PM Kishida later vowed to double the spending on children and families in an effort to control the declining birth rate in the country. Bloomberg reported that the pace of declining is increasing. The population has dropped to 124.6 million from a peak of slightly more than 128 million in 2008.
She added, “It’s the people who have to live through the process of disappearance who will face enormous harm. It is a terrible disease that will afflict those children,” reported Bloomberg.
Meanwhile, the proportion of prople aged 65 and older increased to more than 29 per cent.
