Sept. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Japan needs more childcare facilities to help reverse the trend of an aging and decreasing population, said Mizuho Fukushima, the new minister in charge of addressing the country’s birthrate.

Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s government “is going to provide childcare support as much as it can to create a society where Japanese people can have a dream of raising children,” Fukushima said in a group interview today in Tokyo. Previous administrations “have been weak on providing financial support even though they have taken steps to tackle the daycare shortage problems.”

Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan won a landslide election last month, breaking more than 50 years of almost uninterrupted rule by the Liberal Democratic Party. He has pledged 16.8 trillion yen ($185 billion) in spending on tuition and jobless aid, child support and lowering corporate taxes to revive a stagnant economy and encourage the growth of families.

Under his plan, families would get 13,000 yen a month per child under 15 in the year beginning April 2010 and 26,000 yen the following year. Fukushima, who heads the Social Democratic Party, a minority member of Hatoyama’s coalition, advocates less money going to families in return for spending more on building and improving pre-school and after-school programs.

“I want to secure enough funding not only for the child allowances, but also to support childcare facilities,” she said, adding there are more than 30,000 children who are on the waiting list to be enrolled in daycare centers.

Japan has the world’s most rapidly aging population, with the highest proportion of people older than 65 years and the lowest ratio of citizens younger than 15. The population of about 128 million could shrink 26 percent by 2050 because of the declining birthrate, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research in Tokyo.

Among other policies, Fukushima also pledged to consider allowing fertility treatments to be covered by insurance and to enhance such treatments.

To contact the reporters on this story: Tomoko Yamazaki in Tokyo at tyamazaki@bloomberg.net; Komaki Ito in Tokyo at kito@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: September 25, 2009 03:42 EDT