The Japan Times Online
Japan's population only grew by .17% last year. And it is getting older. The average household size is only 2.57. That's like 1/2 a kid per house. It'd be interesting to see what the number of kids per family ratio is.

Thru conversations with my students most of them have 1 or 2 kids, with 1 child being the majority. It is just too expensive to have kids. It's like a thousand bucks to send your kid to kindergarten for a year, which is crazy, cuz the teachers don't teach them anything anyway. That's why they all go to cram school... and pay more tuition for. Personally, if I were paying 10 grand for my kid to go to highschool, I'd be raising up a HUGE stink if they weren't learning anything. Hiroshi says that's cuz I'm a westerner. Japanese people don't complain. That's just silly.

Anyway, while the population is growing at a rate that is essentially zero, the number of people in metropolitan Tokyo, still outnumbers the population of Canada. Yes the entire country.