Feature: Decreasing "new adults" cloud Japan's Coming-of-Age Day

"When I woke up this morning, I felt like a brand-new person. I'm an adult now," Saki, a 20-year-old university student, said at a Coming-of-Age ceremony held in Osaka on Monday.

In Japan, the second Monday of January marks the Coming-of-Age Day, a national holiday when young people who turned 20 the previous year or will do so before April 2 this year celebrate their adulthood.

To mark this important day, Saki got up very early in the morning and spent hours dressing up. She put on an expensive "furisode" kimono which she booked from a rental shop months ago, and dressed her hair in a salon.

On Monday afternoon, Saki came to Viale Osaka, a hotel where a Coming-of-Age ceremony was held by the local government. About 200 new adults from the central district of Osaka attended the event.

A representative of the new adults gave a speech at the ceremony, in which he thanked his parents and teachers as well as the society, and swore to take responsibility as an adult from now on.

"Becoming adult means you have to take responsibility for what you do," said Saki, agreeing with the speaker.

But adulthood also means new liberties. In Japan, people start having the right to smoke, drink alcohol and marry without permission from parents when they turn 20.

Just after the ceremony, a group of the young adults could hardly wait to embrace this liberty and took turns to drink from a bottle of wine on the street.

While the young people celebrate their new freedom with City Hall ceremonies, shrine visits and wild parties, many worry about an increasingly aging population in the country.

Statistics from the government show that as of Jan. 1, there were an estimated 1.21 million new adults, a decrease of about 50,000 from a year earlier, and less than half of the 2.46 million in 1970.

"The Japanese society is not sustainable while the falling population problem remains unaddressed. I have high expectations of young people," Hideki Matsuzaki, mayor of Urayasu, said at a local Coming-of-Age ceremony, hoping the young people to make more efforts to tackle the low birth rate.

According to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, the number of people aged 20 in Japan is expected to fall to 1.06 million in 2025. Endit