In a bizarre move to address the country’s declining population, the Japanese government launched a new initiative to support single women moving out of Tokyo to rural areas to get married and thus fill the gap of a shrinking female population in the countryside. The government believed that the move would counter the trend of young women remaining in Tokyo for education or work, which has led to fewer single women in rural areas compared to single men, worsening population challenges.

The government also announced that it would cover travel costs for matchmaking events and provide additional financial incentives for those who decide to relocate. The government was probably guided by the 2020 national census that showed the total number of single women aged between 15 and 49 in 46 of Japan’s 47 prefectures, excluding Tokyo, was about 9.1 million, which was approximately 20 per cent less than the 11.1 million single men in the same age group, with the gap reaching around 30 per cent in some prefectures. As in other countries, in Japan as well, women shift base to larger cities such as Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya and others for better education and work, leaving fewer single women compared to single men in the countryside.

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The financial subsidy for those willing to relocate to rural areas from Tokyo’s 23 wards and get married to a man living in a less populous part of Japan entailed an offer of 600,000 yen or about $4200. The government noticed that while Tokyo gets more and more crowded, smaller regional communities are quickly shrinking. With fewer local births and kids moving away to Tokyo when they grow up, the Japanese capital faces the pressure to accommodate increasing numbers of people. The government therefore felt that the population needs to be evenly distributed and hence the irrational financial dole out plan.

It is a fact that Japan is grappling with a dangerous demographic challenge as its birth rate has hit an all-time low, with only 727,277 births recorded in 2023 and a fertility rate of 1.20, far below the 2.1 needed for a stable population. Though the government has launched various initiatives, including financial incentives to couples to have children, expanded childcare facilities and even a statebacked dating app in Tokyo that uses AI to match singles, all such initiatives overlook the basic fact that the decisions to marry and to have kids are individual choices and the government has no business to infringe into a citizen’s personal life.

In a democratic system, such a view is bound to be seen as regressive and is destined to have a negative impact. Political leaders in Japan, among whom the perception is dominant that women are secondclass citizens and where once a lawmaker made an outlandish statement inside the Diet that women are mere baby-making machines, such thoughts of encouraging single women out of Tokyo with monetary incentives is just a retrograde step. As it transpired soon after, the government was forced to cancel the programme when opposition built up against the proposal and the move was seen as discriminatory and lacking sensitivity. The government clearly failed to read that the move would have led to societal collapse and efforts to counterbalance the demographic decline were bound to face a roadblock. This does not undermine the fact that drop in birth rates is the gravest crisis that Japan faces at present.

The government’s initial move was to launch a dating app in an effort to promote marriages and boost the falling national birth rate. As a first step, the users were required to undergo a thorough registration process and submit the necessary documents to prove they were legally single. They were also required to confirm their willingness to get married. The requirements for those willing to participate were to provide their annual salary, personal information, including height, educational background and occupation. These were mandatory for an interview with the app’s operator and were deemed humiliating and misogynistic. What led the government to resort to this bizarre move to address the demographic issue?

True, births fell for the eighth consecutive year to 758,631, a drop of 5.1 per cent in 2024 and the government was alarmed about this. In 2023, Japan recor ded more than twice as many deaths as births. The government realises the problem and is prepared to take unprecedented ste ps such as expanding childcare and promoting wage hikes for younger workers to cope with the declining birth-rate. But, as stated, it overlooks the core message that the decision to have a baby or not is an individual choice and this cannot be influenced or regulated by any government measure. It is projected that in the next six years or so until 2030, the number of young people will rapidly decline and therefore there is a need to reverse this trend.

Surveys have revealed that unmarried rates for 50-year-old people in Tokyo were highest at 32 per cent for men and 24 per cent for women. Because of the low marriage rate, fewer children (90,000 babies) were born in Tokyo, a 15.2 per cent drop from a decade earlier. Successive governments have realised this and have adopted a range of measures to support child-bearing households. But nothing has worked. Abe Shinzo initiated his Womenomics to bring in more females into the labour force as declining birth rates led to a shortage of men in the labour force.

Fumio Kishida also described the drop in birth rates as the gravest crisis our country faces and said that urgent steps were needed to tackle the declining birth rate in one of the world’s oldest societies. Many men and women are marrying late, when a woman’s fertility period is over, or not marrying at all. Then, there are couples of child-bearing age with stable jobs who prefer not to have kids, creating the acronym DINKS (double income no kids). More and more women prefer to be independent without any child-rearing responsibility as they are aware that child-rearing is mostly the responsibility of the woman in a Japanese household

(The writer is former Senior Fellow at the Pradhanmantri Memorial Museum and Library, Ministry of Culture, New Delhi, and ICCR Chair Professor at Reitaku University, Japan)