Photo/Illutration The Asahi Shimbun

Students across all age groups are displaying an alarming decline in perfect vision, prompting the education ministry to authorize the first thorough study of the problem next year to ascertain why.

A frequently cited cause is the hours spent looking at smartphones and video games instead of playing outdoors with other children.

"This is a situation that we can no longer ignore," said a ministry official.

Students experiencing impaired vision are encouraged to see an ophthalmologist as early as possible before the problem worsens.

The education ministry on Dec. 20 released the results of a fiscal 2019 study into students' health and found record levels of children with less than normal eyesight.

A sample survey of children between the ages of 5 and 17 based on their health screening results found that 34.57 percent of elementary school children had poor eyesight, an increase of 13.35 percentage points over fiscal 1990.

Likewise, 57.47 percent of junior high school students and 67.64 percent of senior high school students had vision problems.

Those figures represented increases of 15.89 percentage points and 11.26 percentage points, respectively, over the fiscal 1990 levels. Among children in kindergarten, 26.06 percentage had poor eyesight, slightly less than the record 28.93 percent of fiscal 2008.

Education ministry officials were baffled by the cause of the problem, but speculated time looking at small display screens at close range rather than playing outdoors might well be a factor.

One thing is for sure. More children now have smartphones than ever before.

According to a Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications study in 2013, 17.9 percent of children between the ages of 6 and 12 had smartphones, while 64.3 percent of those between 13 and 19 did so. But, by 2018, the respective figures had shot up to 32.9 percent and 83.8 percent.

The education ministry is keen to take steps to deal with the issue as soon as possible in light of its plan to provide a computer to each elementary and junior high school student in a program that will cost 430 billion yen ($3.9 billion).

(This article was written by Daisuke Yajima and Ryo Miyazaki.)