In Japan, fewer than 700,000 babies were born in 2024, and this was the lowest annual number of births in Japan's recorded history.
NOT BSTOTAL BS
NOT BS — Verdict: True
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The Short Version
Official Japanese vital statistics report 686,061 births in 2024, which is below 700,000 and the lowest annual total since record-keeping began in 1899. The strongest evidence comes from the health ministry and government statistics portal. Some secondary reports use slightly different wording, but that does not change the bottom line.
Caveats
Some secondary articles ambiguously refer to births to “Japanese nationals,” so the cleanest framing is that this is Japan’s official 2024 vital-statistics birth total.
The 2024 figure should be attributed to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s annual vital statistics release rather than to tertiary summaries.
A non-official contradictory figure appears in the source list, but it is not a reliable dataset and is internally inconsistent.