The country has also widely adopted other measures to prevent the transmission of the virus, including placing hand sanitizer at the entrance to virtually all commercial spaces and workplaces and broad adherence to government recommendations to avoid the “three C’s”: closed, crowded places and close contact with others.
Another factor, albeit small, is the decrease in traffic accidents as fewer people take to the roads, especially since the government has declared a state of emergency twice. Road accident deaths fell by almost 12% in 2020 to 2,839, according to data maintained by the National Police Agency. It was the smallest number since the agency started tracking data in 1948.
Japan is not alone in seeing the peripheral benefits of coronavirus measures. Deaths in China fell slightly in the first three months of 2020 outside the epicenter of the Wuhan virus, according to a study by the University of Oxford and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Although the reduction in deaths in Japan was a welcome development, there were some ominous signs. The country has seen a resurgence of suicides, especially among women, with just under 4% more people taking their own lives in 2020 than in the previous year. Among women, the increase was almost 15%.
Experts traced the phenomenon to stresses related to the pandemic, including job losses, the increased isolation of people living in the area and the growing domestic burdens borne by women.
Japan’s population also continued to decline, despite the decline in overall deaths. The country, which began to shrink in 2007 due to falling birth rates and an increasing proportion of the elderly, lost more than 511,000 people in 2020, a slight acceleration from the previous year.
Births declined again last year, suggesting that the pandemic is likely to accelerate depopulation in Japan. According to government projections, the population, which now stands at 126 million, will drop to less than 100 million in 2053 and fall to 88 million in 2065.