Now the number of children in Japan is at its lowest since 1950. Figures released by the internal affairs ministry says there are just over 14.6 million children in the country under the age of 14. Japan's (1) replacing huge pressures on public spending and resulting in labor shortages. Our global population correspondent, Stephanie Hegarty has been looking into the story.

This is part of a (2) that we're seeing in all advanced economies and a lot of developing economies too, and, and it's dating back to after the war as more women enter the workforce they decide to (3) and they have less children as a result because the window of opportunity for having children is shorter but what we're seeing in Japan is that this is (4) I mean the Japanese government didn't expect to be seeing these numbers until about 2028. So, it's accelerating quite rapidly and that's for various reasons. What happens globally is when we have shocks, especially (5) , that leads people to take a step back and decide "maybe it's not the time to have a child now" and we saw that in the 2008 Crash, saw that in the late 90s in Asia, and we saw it during the (6). So, these, these patterns are definitely accelerating and what tends to happen, what happened after 2008 is people don't (uh) they don't go backwards you know, once society decides to have less children, they (7) to having more later.

I mean over the years. I sort of can't (um) forget images I'd seen of children sitting at their mother's desks under, under the desk in the workplace in Japan because things like (1) are not necessarily readily available, the (2) of the workplace isn't necessarily tailored for a woman to be able to have those support networks.

I think there's two dynamics that are playing out not just in Japan but in their neighbors China and South Korea where you've got these very advanced economies with (3) . Japan's got one of the highest ratios of women in the workplace, higher than the US for example, but it's also got really (4) in domestic work so the amount of time on average the Japanese man, father spends doing work at home is (5) a day compared to the US which is two and a half hours a day, so this profound gender imbalance seems to be leading a lot of Japanese women to say "I don't want that life. I don't want to have to do everything at home and I don't want to have to work very hard" and then you've also got this (6) where people are expected to really put in the hours and that's just not compatible with family life.

1. Which new words/phrases were easiest to remember? Give three.

どの語句/文が覚えやすかったですか？３つ挙げてください。

どの語句/文が話したり理解するのに難しかったですか？３つ挙げてください。