Japan's population fell to 123 million in 2025, down by more than 3 million from 2020, according to preliminary census results released Friday. The five-year drop is the biggest decline since the government began collecting census data in 1920.
That number lands at a moment when Japan is already confronting a labor shortage, strain on health care and a countryside that keeps losing people. The country is now roughly the same size it was in 1989, after peaking at 128 million in 2008, and the new count shows how fast the slide has accelerated.
All but two of Japan's 47 prefectures reported population decreases in 2025, with the northern prefectures of Akita and Aomori shrinking by about 8 percent from 2020 to 2025. The losses were especially visible outside the big cities, where schools, hospitals and train lines are harder to keep open as communities age and young people leave for jobs and education elsewhere.
Okinawa moved against the national current. Its population grew slightly, and women there have an average of 1.5 children in their lifetimes, the highest fertility rate in Japan, even as the national rate stands at 1.1 children per woman. Tokyo also rose slightly to 37 million, about 30 percent of Japan's total population, and the metropolitan area is about 20 times as dense as the national average.
The contrast is sharp because Japan has spent decades trying to persuade young people to have more children, with little effect. For each new birth, there are two deaths, and long-term projections still point lower, with the population forecast to fall to 87 million by 2070. That leaves immigration and policy change as the obvious levers, but the government has so far taken a cautious approach to opening the country more widely to foreigners.
James Raymo, a Princeton University demographer, said Japan has reached a level of decline that is not reversible in the short or medium term, and he said it will not change without mass immigration. That is the question now hanging over the census: whether Japan is willing to accept enough newcomers, fast enough, to slow a contraction that is already reshaping the country.
