Tokyo City Hall will play matchmaker. In an attempt to stem the collapse in the number of births in Japan, the metropolitan government will launch its own dating application this summer.
To register, people will need to provide documentation proving they are legally single, and sign a letter stating they are looking for a soul mate to marry. A tax notice must also be provided, to prove their annual income. Dating apps in Japan often require you to declare your income.
“Give a little help”
“We learned that 70% of people who want to get married are not participating in (marriage dating) events or are not on dating apps,” a Tokyo government official in charge said Tuesday. of the new application. “We want to give them a little help” with this new tool, which is currently in the testing phase.
It is not uncommon in Japan for town halls to organize matrimonial dating events. But it is still rare for them to launch their own online applications in this area.
The Tokyo project sparked a lot of negative comments on Japanese social media: “Should the government do this with our taxes? » asked an Internet user. But others said they were interested because they would feel safer with an official app like this.
The decline in the marriage rate in Japan is a key factor in the fall in the birth rate in the country, as births outside a legal union remain extremely low, around 2%, noted an OECD report published in early 2024.
An aging population
Births in Japan fell last year for an eighth consecutive year, and their fall was also severe (-5.1% over one year). And at the same time, the number of deaths in the archipelago was twice that of births. The accelerated aging of the national population poses increasingly significant problems, for example with labor shortages in many sectors of activity.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has promised a more generous family policy, but so far all governments in the archipelago have failed to reverse the trend.