Japanese government plans to pay women who move out of Tokyo to get married 600,000 yen【Report】

Chance to say “I do,” “Goodbye, Tokyo,” and “Kaching!” all in one fell swoop could be coming.

Japan’s population is dropping, but you probably wouldn’t guess it from walking around Tokyo. Japan’s capital feels as bustlingly crowded as ever as an increasing proportion of the country’s population concentrates there.

So as Tokyo gets more and more crowded, smaller regional communities are quickly shrinking, with fewer local births followed by a lot of those kids moving away to Tokyo when they grow up. The Japanese government would like to see the population more evenly distributed, though, and according to a report from new service Kyodo, their newest plan is to pay 600,000 yen (approximately US$4,000) to women if they move away from Tokyo and get married to a guy living in a less populous part of Japan.

Bachelorettes either living in Tokyo’s 23 central wards or commuting to workplaces within them would be eligible for the payment. The list of applicable cities/regions to move to has yet to be set, but since the goal is to bolster the residency numbers for communities where the possibility of fading away is a concern, odds are cities that are smaller than Tokyo but still huge in their own right, such as Osaka, won’t be included, and instead the focus will be on more rural communities, or at least smaller regional hub cities.

This wouldn’t be the first time for the Japanese government to offer a fat stack of yen to try to encourage people to move away from Tokyo. Currently, grants of up to 600,000 yen for individuals, or 1 million yen for families, are available for Tokyo’s 23-ward residents or commuters who relocate to designated municipalities, as long as they secure local employment, continue their current job through telecommuting, or start a new business in their new home. However, women would not have to secure or even look for work to be eligible for the move-away-from-Tokyo-to-get-married grant, Kyodo says, citing an unnamed source involved with the project planning. and that it would be separate from the 600,000-yen payment, so that a women who moves away from Tokyo both to get married and to work would ostensibly be able to collect both sums.

Kyodo’s report also acknowledges that gender-locking the grant to women could cause a public backlash, and one could possibly argue that offering money only to women is an indirect way of pushing women out of the capital and/or trapping men within it. On the other hand, the designers of the proposal might feel, or have data showing, that women born in rural communities are especially likely to move away in pursuit of educational/professional opportunities they don’t have in their hometowns, especially if the local economy is skewed towards predominantly male-dominated industries such as agriculture and manufacturing, and thus feel that those rural communities need an influx of Tokyo ladies to sufficiently repopulate.

According to Kyodo’s source, the Cabinet Secretariat plans to include funds for the program in budget for the 2025 fiscal year, which begins next spring.

Source: Kyodo, Financial Field
Top image: Pakutaso
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