The number of Japanese people living in the country as of Jan. 1 fell below 120 million, logging the sharpest drop on record from a year before, the internal affairs ministry said Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The number of Japanese residents fell by 916,744, or 0.76%, to 119,736,483, marking the 17th consecutive year of decline, the ministry said using resident registry data.<\/p>\n
The data showed that the number of foreign residents in the country rose by 353,696, or 9.62%, to 4,031,159, the highest since the ministry started taking statistics for such residents in 2013.<\/p>\n
The foreign population in Japan has been growing since 2023 following the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. The number of people who moved to the country from abroad reached a record high of 720,988 in 2025.<\/p>\n
Among Japan\u2019s 47 prefectures, Tokyo reported an increase in Japanese residents for the third year in a row, rising by 12,540, or 0.09%, to 13,293,851, or 11.1% of the total Japanese population.<\/p>\n
The remaining 46 prefectures all marked decreases in the number of Japanese people. The Japanese population in Akita fell most among them, at 1.95%, followed by Aomori and Kochi, both at 1.7%.<\/p>\n
The number of Japanese births hit a record low of 670,467 in 2025, while there were 1,593,475 Japanese deaths. The natural population decline, or the number of deaths minus that of births, reached 923,008.<\/p>\n
None of the 47 prefectures posted a natural population increase. Seven prefectures logged net social population growth, or a situation in which the number of people moving in exceeds that of those moving out, with Tokyo marking the largest net increase, at 66,661.<\/p>\n
The combined number of Japanese and foreign residents in the country fell by 563,048, or 0.45%, to 123,767,642.<\/p>\n
The combined population in the Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya metropolitan areas totaled 65,979,272, falling for the sixth straight year but accounting for more than half of the country\u2019s overall population.<\/p>\n
The total number of Japanese and foreign residents rose in three prefectures. The population in Tokyo rose by 75,019, or 0.54%, to 14,077,553, while that in Osaka grew by 3,365, or 0.04%, to 8,775,326, and that in Chiba increased by 2,169, or 0.03%, to 6,313,748.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The number of Japanese people living in the country as of Jan. 1 fell below 120 million, logging…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65712,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13301,9614,8,17,13420],"class_list":["post-65711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-japan","tag-depopulation","tag-internal-affairs-ministry","tag-japan","tag-japanese","tag-population"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65711\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}