Non-Japanese babies make up more than 3 percent of births in Japan, a record high

Percentage is even higher in Tokyo and other areas attractive to foreign residents, and even then doesn’t tell the full story of how Japan is becoming more international.

There are a number of reasons why Japan, for much of its history, has had a low percentage of non-ethnically Japanese residents. Island geography for one, plus that whole “close the country’s borders so no one gets in or out for a couple centuries” (with certain exceptions) thing that the shogunate tried. Even in the post World War II-era, a lot of Japan’s foreign residents have been temporary ones, with many returning to their home nations or otherwise eventually heading elsewhere rather than settling down permanently in Japan.

But Japan’s non-Japanese population has been growing rapidly in the past few years, and not just from inbound immigration, as a new statistical analysis shows that in 2024 more than 3 percent of the babies born in Japan were non-Japanese.

Last year, more than 20,000 non-Japanese babies were born in Japan, a figure that, along with the 3-plus percent, is believed to be the highest ever. Since that percentage is for the country as a whole, in certain areas the proportion of non-Japanese babies was significantly higher, especially in and around Tokyo and other cities that attract large numbers of international residents.

Within the 23 wards that make up central Tokyo, for example, more than one in 10 babies (10.2 percent) born in Ota Ward in 2024 were non-Japanese, with Katsushika and Edogawa Wards both having 8.6 percent non-Japanese births. Other municipalities had even higher percentages. In Saitama Prefecture, which borders Tokyo to the north, 21.8 percent of 2024’s babies were non-Japanese in the city of Warabi, which has a total population of roughly 75,000 people, and Kawaguchiko’s percentage was 12.7. East of Tokyo in Chiba Prefecture, the towns of Narita, Matsudo, Funabashi, and Chiba City all had non-Japanese birth figures of 6 percent or more (13.9, 7.4, 6, and 6.1 percent, respectively).

Outside of the Tokyo area, high percentages also occurred in Gunma Prefecture’s Isezaki (11.8 percent). Aichi Prefecture, home of automaker Toyota and several related industrial manufacturers, had high percentages in the cities of Kani (19.8 percent), Aichi’s Toyota (6.1 percent), Toyohashi (8.5 percent), Nishio (14.1 percent) and Komaki 13 percent.

It’d be going too far to say that the streets of these cities are packed with non-Japanese residents, as in most of them the high ratio of non-Japanese births in 2024 still only accounts for around 150 to 200 babies. However, the statistics actually underrepresent the growing internationalization of Japan. For the analysis, a baby was considered “non-Japanese” either if both of its parents are non-Japanese, or if the child was born out of wedlock to a non-Japanese mother. This means that babies born to international married couples in which one spouse is Japanese and the other is not were counted as Japanese births, and so the percentage of babies born in Japan with at least partial non-Japanese ancestry is even higher than the figures mentioned above.

As to whether or not the increase in non-Japanese births will have long-term effects on the makeup of Japanese society, two key issues come immediately to mind. For a long time, child educational concerns have been a contributing factor for foreign families living in Japan deciding to leave the country, with non-Japanese parents often uneasy about putting their children through Japan’s regular school system and unable to afford international school tuition, which is very pricey in Japan. Ostensibly, more foreign couples’ babies being in Japan would mean more opportunities to acquire native, or near-native, Japanese language skills at a young age, which could make putting their children into the normal Japanese school system a more viable option.

Another major issue, though, is citizenship. Unlike some other countries, such as the United States, Japan has no birthright citizenship system. While a baby born to legal foreign residents of Japan can live within the country as a dependent, simply being born within Japan’s borders does not give a baby Japanese citizenship, and complications could arise once the child becomes an adult.

Source: Nihon Keizai Shimbun via Jin, Twitter/@nikkei
Top image: Pakutaso
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