By RYUICHI HISANAGA/ Staff Writer
August 25, 2022 at 18:08 JST
The health ministry office in Tokyo's Kasumigaseki district (Asahi Shimbun file photo)
Couples who divorced after decades of married life were at their highest rate since 1947, when statistics were first available, according to health ministry data released on Aug. 24.
There were 193,253 couples who divorced in 2020.
Of these, 21.5 percent were mature couples who had lived together for two decades or more.
The ratio is around 1.5 times higher than the 13.9 percent recorded in 1990.
The data showed the divorce rate for such couples has been on the rise for around seven decades.
However, after peaking in 2002 with 289,836 divorces, the total number of divorces has been on a downward trend.
The ministry compiled the data based on the demographic statistics in 2020.
One in three married couples divorced when it added the marriage rate into the calculation, the ministry said.
By prefectures, the divorce rate, which indicates the number of divorces per 1,000 people, was highest in Okinawa Prefecture at 2.36 in 2020.
That is followed by Miyazaki Prefecture, at 1.79; Fukuoka Prefecture, at 1.77; Hokkaido, at 1.75; and Osaka Prefecture, at 1.73.
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