Kotoe Hashimoto, 37, a commentator and former parliamentary candidate, posted a photograph of herself holding her newborn on social media on Aug. 29, thanking the doctors, midwives and nurses who attended the birth, The Straits Times reported.

The post drew 10,800 likes on Facebook.

In a follow-up post the same day, Hashimoto thanked well-wishers and said the present moment was the time for Japanese women to bear children, arguing that the nation's rise or fall rested on women's participation.

Births in Japan rose 0.8% in the first six months of 2026 to 342,068, an increase of 2,788 from the same period a year earlier and the first January-June gain in 11 years, Kyodo News reported on Aug. 28, citing Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare data.

The count includes children born to foreign residents.

Japan's total fertility rate fell to a record low of 1.14 in 2025, a tenth consecutive annual decline, according to ministry data reported by Nikkei Asia.

Births to Japanese nationals fell by 14,937 to 671,236, the lowest on a series that begins in 1899, Nippon.com reported. Tokyo recorded 0.96 for a second straight year, while Okinawa posted the highest rate at 1.52.

Japan's population, including foreign residents, stood at 123,049,524 in the 2025 census, down about 3.1 million or 2.5% from 2020 and the steepest fall since the survey began in 1920, the internal affairs ministry said in May.

Kyodo reported that projections still point to a long-term decline in births as the population of childbearing age shrinks and more people delay or forgo marriage.

Japanese writer Kotoe Hashimoto with her 7th child, in a photo she shared on Facebook on Aug. 29, 2026.

Hashimoto contested Hiroshima's 5th district in the Oct. 22, 2017 general election as a candidate for Kibo no To, or the Party of Hope. She took 27,912 votes, about 21.7% of the district, and lost, according to election records compiled by Jiji Press and Yomiuri Shimbun.

The party, founded by Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike ahead of that election, dissolved in May 2018, with most members forming the Democratic Party for the People and a conservative minority reorganizing under the same name.

That successor party, by then reduced to a single lawmaker, disbanded on Oct. 1, 2021. Koike, who stepped down as leader within months of founding it, remains governor of Tokyo.

Shukan Josei PRIME reported that on Sept. 18, 2025 Hashimoto described postpartum depression as a fictitious diagnosis that exists nowhere outside Japan, said neither American nor World Health Organization classifications recognize it as a standalone condition, and called those treated for it parasites on the wage earners who fund the insurance system.

The weekly reported she made similar claims in 2020, telling followers that husbands should scold wives who used postpartum depression as an excuse and calling the condition self-indulgence, a post that pushed the term into Japan's trending topics.

The World Health Organization's ICD-11, in force since January 2022, codes postpartum mental illness directly, both as disorders associated with childbirth and the puerperium and through a perinatal specifier attached to depressive episodes.

The American Psychiatric Association's DSM-5-TR does not list it as a standalone disorder but classifies it as major depressive disorder with peripartum onset, on the finding that about half of postpartum episodes begin before delivery.