It recently put into place a series of measures intended to reverse its shrinking birthrate, including a payment of $11,000 to women after a second child.
Japan's loss of gumption is most visible among its young men, who are widely derided as "herbivores" for lacking their elders' willingness to toil for endless hours at the office, or even to succeed in romance, which many here blame, only half jokingly, for their country's shrinking birthrate.
Even in North Africa, regarded as the great exception to the shrinking population trend, birthrates have dropped somewhat.
Church attendance has fallen steeply, and families are shrinking because of one of the world's lowest birthrates.
Michael's margins, once in the thousands, back when the birthrate was a lot higher, have been steadily shrinking for decades.
And in Mexico, the source of about 6 in 10 illegal immigrants in the United States, the birthrate has plummeted over the last few decades, shrinking the pool of potential emigrants.
It refuses migrants, so its population is shrinking and aging a difficult trend to reverse once a countrys birthrate has declined so rapidly.
While the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand will continue to grow because of higher birthrates and immigration, Europe, Japan and South Korea will shrink (although the recession reduced birthrates in the United States and Spain and slowed rising birthrates in Russia and Norway).
The shrinking population is due to well-known trends: assimilation, children moving elsewhere, declining birthrate.
Its working-age population is expected to peak and start shrinking within five years, partly as a result of the one-child policy that depressed birthrates and accelerated the aging of the population.
He said: "The rise in pupil numbers, which is easy to predict from birthrates, is putting huge pressure on school places and an increasing demand on the shrinking pool of teachers.
