Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced Monday that combating the low birth rate will be his government’s top priority and revealed that fewer than 800,000 births were registered in 2022.
Kishida has thus promised before the Japanese Diet or Parliament a package of «unprecedented» measures to promote the birth rate by resorting to stable financial sources to ensure the achievement of these objectives, according to the Japanese public television NHK.
The president has assured that Japan is at a «critical crossroads» 77 years after World War II «on the verge of not being able to continue functioning as a society» and therefore must «break with current practices» to build «a society, an economy and an international order appropriate to the new era».
Japan has 125 million inhabitants and 28 percent are over 65 years old. The birth rate was 1.34 children per woman and 800,000 births in 2022, while in recent years there have been more than 1.44 million deaths per year. Studies already predict that Japan will have fewer than 53 million inhabitants by the end of the century if the trend is not reversed.
Kishida has also proposed raising the defense budget to 40 trillion yen (about 310 billion euros) over the next five years. A quarter of these funds will come from tax increases.
Kishida also mentioned the rise in prices and pointed out that the government will try to raise wages and will speed up the planned labor reform to penalize temporary employment and promote retraining.
In the field of energy, Kishida highlighted his government’s commitment to the construction of the latest generation of nuclear reactors and the extension of the operation of the plants currently in operation.
OPPOSITION RESPONSE The president of the Constitutional Democratic Party, Kenta Izumi, has reproached Kishida that in a situation of lower funds available to the government, it is only the defense budget that is increasing.
He also criticized Kishida for his declared intention but without concrete measures to combat the low birth rate and recalled that the ruling Liberal Democratic Party has been in power for ten years promising a response to this problem without having achieved results.
The secretary general of the Japan Innovation Party, Fumitake Fujita, questioned the financing of the increase in military spending and raised the need to innovate in order to obtain the necessary funds.
Japanese Communist Party spokesman Kazuo Shii has advanced that the people will not support the increase in military spending because Kishida has not given «any convincing explanation» about the reasons for it and warned that it means acquiring the ability to attack enemy bases and an unprecedented expansion of Japan’s military power.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
