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The story
It was reported that Japan’s Children and Families Agency plans to request about ¥7.8 trillion in its budget request for fiscal 2027 — the largest amount since the agency’s founding — sparking a divided debate on a 5ch thread. Supporters argued that benefits and support for child-raising households are actually insufficient, while skeptics countered that it’s unreasonable to face criticism without disclosing a breakdown, insisting the agency show where the money would go first. The discussion also touched on individual budget items, including the gap between existing programs like child allowances and free childcare and the requested amount, as well as the scrapped AI development project and the use of funds from the so-called ‘singles tax.’
The Children and Families Agency has begun coordinating to request about ¥7.8 trillion in its initial fiscal 2027 budget request — the largest amount since its establishment in 2023. This is roughly ¥320 billion more than the previous year’s request. It includes funding for countermeasures against the record-high number of child suicides and for improving the environment around children’s social media use.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Read the original article here
What people said
Most of this budget goes toward managing benefit payments and actual support for households raising kids — if anything it's not enough, it's not something you can just cut.
That's exactly why they should publish it with that stuff excluded.
There's definitely a ton of unnecessary stuff in there too.
Then show us the breakdown 😅
You said it, so you can back it up, right?
I get why single people complain, but it's wild seeing parents who are actually raising kids say to abolish the Children and Families Agency.
Where is this after-school program with pickup service? Seriously, I can't even find it when I search.
Well, not exactly pickup, but they do come get the kids from school once classes end.
Re: #11 is saying the after-school program drops kids off at home.
The topic here is the ¥7.8 trillion, though? Do you even know what we're talking about?
The broad outline is similar to this, right?
I'm saying it's increasing because things are changing.
You can't just fill in the blanks yourself and then claim it can't be cut — that's the point I'm making.
Then tell me exactly what and how much you think can be cut.
It's only going up 4%, so nothing's really changing.
If anything, a review would probably show it's not enough.
Because the number of adults is shrinking too.
Everyone already knows that much.
Is that even relevant?
Re: #65
Care to explain?
Parents these days both work, so childcare gets outsourced from age zero.
Can't believe you don't even know that.
Scary.
That cost should be borne by the couple outsourcing it — it's no reason for the Children and Families Agency to foot the bill.
If you can't cover daycare operating costs, have one of you quit and raise the kid at home.
Why are you married couples using us single people's tax money just so you can both keep working?
671,236
If you split ¥7.8 trillion among newborns,
that's about ¥11,620,637 per child.
Just scrap the agency and wire ¥10 million to every family that has a kid.
That leaves ¥1 trillion left over, so hand that out to preschool/kindergarten workers.
Problem solved, birthrate crisis over.
It's obvious some parents would blow the money on useless stuff, and rich households, poor households, and single-parent households are all in different situations, so it wouldn't solve anything.
Once the subsidy amount is public knowledge, it just becomes a target to squeeze — you can tell from how maternity hospitals raised their fees to match the increased childbirth lump-sum payment. But with an amount that big, whoever's trying to price-gouge off the back of it would have a hard time deciding how much to jack prices up.
That has nothing to do with the Children and Families Agency.
Well, the fact that raising kids costs money is one of the causes of the falling birthrate, isn't it?
That's because most of the Children and Families Agency's budget is childcare-related spending.
Even if you abolished the agency, some other ministry would just end up handling child support with that same money.
The whole point is that raising kids costs money, which is why there are all these allowances and support programs — yet people come in with criticism from completely out of left field, like 'it's pointless, stop wasting tax money.'
・Collaboration with the J.League
・Priority lanes for children at national facilities
・Subsidies for open-plan kitchens
・Home visits for child-raising households
・Training personnel to advise children on sex education (5-year plan)
・Abuse-detection AI → spent ¥1 billion, then scrapped it
・Introduction of the 'singles tax'
・Handling adult advertising
Honestly, I get why they'd want to develop abuse-detection AI.
These days, if a couple with a young kid has a loud enough argument that the neighbors hear it, a child welfare center worker shows up the next day citing psychological abuse.
They've positioned the past few years as the peak of countermeasures, with the period through 2027 marked as the intensive push — that's why it's like this.
'It's only been around a short time' has nothing to do with it.
It's crazy that the gap between this and the defense budget — which covers that many SDF personnel plus missiles, tanks, and fighter jets — is only ¥1-2 trillion.
What's with people who complain without even checking something you could look up in two seconds?
Child allowances, free childcare, better pay for daycare workers, higher-education support — basically everything the public said was needed for birthrate countermeasures is in there.
Even so, isn't it too much?
Add up all those allowances together and the total payout is ¥3 trillion.
What's the other ¥4 trillion going toward?
Which part don't you get?
Specifically, what part of Re: #200 is wasteful?
Wouldn't that work? Even on average a person pays tens of millions of yen in taxes over a lifetime, so it seems like it'd easily pay for itself.
It'd be a problem if the kid got killed right after birth for the money, so wouldn't long-term monthly payments be better?
You'd risk people having kids carelessly just for the payout, or criminals exploiting it.
If it's that easy to casually have a kid, the government needs to have facilities and systems ready to clean up the mess.
https://imgur.com/sa1uBew.jpeg
Add the leftover-heavy lunch budget on top of the existing lunch fees and you could feed the kids sushi or steak — this is way too much money considering how few kids there are.
Background and Key Points
The Children and Families Agency (Kodomo Katei-cho) is a young institution, created in April 2023 by pulling child-welfare, childcare, and youth-policy functions out of the health ministry and Cabinet Office into one body. What’s being reported here is a “gaisan yokyu” — an initial budget request submitted each August for the fiscal year starting the following April — not an approved budget; the Finance Ministry screens these down through the autumn, and the real figure is fixed only when the Diet passes the budget around March. ¥7.8 trillion would be roughly a fourteenth of Japan’s entire general-account budget, and the thread’s comparison to the defense budget (also around ¥8-9 trillion) is a legitimate benchmark, not hyperbole. The “singles tax” mentioned is real: a child-support levy folded into health-insurance premiums from 2026, which drew that nickname because childless and unmarried payers contribute without receiving direct benefits.
The thread’s actual fault line isn’t pro- versus anti-child-support; it’s whether a number this size is legitimate to criticize without an itemized breakdown being public, against the view that known line items (allowances, free childcare, higher-education aid) already plausibly add up given how much Japan’s system has expanded since the agency’s launch.
What’s easy to miss is that this figure is a negotiating opener, not a check about to be cut — Japanese agencies routinely request more than the Finance Ministry ultimately grants, and prior years’ requests were similarly trimmed. Readers should also know the agency was explicitly built around a self-declared 2023-2027 “concentrated implementation period” for birthrate measures, which is why spending has been front-loaded rather than flat.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread ‘Children and Families Agency: Give Us ¥7.8 Trillion’.
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