Some 1.43 million people across the country celebrated their coming of age on Monday, a figure equivalent to about 1.12 percent of the total population and tying a record low set in 1987, according to government statistics.

Figures compiled by the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry show that the number of people who greeted the new year at age 20 was about 70,000 less than last year.

The total -- about 730,000 men and roughly 700,000 women -- is the second lowest after the roughly 1.36 million people who celebrated their Coming-of-Age Day in 1987.

Those who popped champagne corks that year were born in 1966, the Hinoe-uma year on the Chinese lunar calendar. There are generally fewer children born in this year, which comes around every 60 years, because of a superstition that women born in a Hinoe-uma year will kill their husbands.

According to government figures, the number of 20-year-olds as of Coming-of-Age Day peaked in 1970 with some 2.46 million baby boomers reaching that threshold. The children of those baby boomers came of age around 1994, when the figure totaled roughly 2.07 million. It has generally fallen since 1995.

Japan's total population is expected to have shrunk in natural terms -- births minus deaths -- in 2005, and the ministry forecasts about 1.27 million new adults in 2010 and 1.24 million in 2015.

This year's new adults were born in 1985, the year in which Yasuhiro Nakasone became the first prime minister in the postwar era to make an official visit to Yasukuni Shrine. It was also the year in which the state telephone and tobacco monopolies were broken up. 1985 saw the worst plane accident in history when a Japan Airlines jumbo jet bound for Osaka from Tokyo crashed and killed 520 people.