Record number of young Japanese people don’t want to get married

A new survey has found that an increasing number of people in Japan aged 18-34 don’t expect to get married.

The results of the government-affiliated National Institute of Population and Social Security’s 2021 survey of 7,862 people, published earlier this month, show that 17.3% of men and 14.6% of women aged between 18 and 34 claimed to have no intention of marrying.

This is the highest such figure since the questionnaire was first conducted in 1982.

Back in the mid-1980s, at the peak of the confident bubble economy years, the numbers were just 2.3% for men and 4.1% for women.

The reasons behind this widely reported trend in the survey suggest that younger people want more freedom and staying single guarantees that. Others, especially women, indicated that they want a career, which is still hampered by having children in Japan. Some men also said they were concerned about job security in the current economic climate in Japan, since they need stable, decently paid work to pay the costs of having children (the national health insurance scheme covers some but not all the costs of giving birth, for instance, plus there are then regular costs like kindergarten or nursery school, followed by even greater expenses later down the line like high school and college).

Should we be worried? Well, marriage is marriage — an outdated institution. It doesn’t really matter if fewer Japanese people are getting married.

Plus, the results are still a massive majority of over 80% for both men and women who say that they want to get marred “someday.” The institution is hardly on its knees.

But it does likely means that fewer people are having children, since parents are still generally married in Japan (even if they tie the knot after pregnancy) — we would be actually more interested in a survey that suggested people no longer associated married with starting a family or even as a life goal per se. Unfortunately, social stigma and issues like taxation benefits and the nature of the family register system in Japan mean the institution is unlikely to go away.

Fewer people expecting to get married then spells problems for the shrinking birth rate and the issue of depopulation as the older generations die off.

The number of marriages has fallen to half a million per year, which is the lowest since 1945. The number of babies born in Japan fell in 2021 by 3.5% to another record low.

Does this mean that fewer people are having sex, as is often suggested? That’s harder to say, since marriage and child birth are not great indicators of sexual activity. Heck, marriage is not even a good indicator of love.