Japan has been aging and having fewer children, which led to a decline of 3.1 million in population over the past five years. For the New York Times, Javier C. Hernández, Pablo Robles, and Kiuko Notoya have the charts and maps to show the drops.
This is a nice step chart. The red-orange hatching emphasizes the negative range, or a net population loss over time. The increase-decrease annotation on each side of the x-axis reinforces the meaning of the values.