- Tokyo is so crowded the government is paying families to leave.
Image: Yuichi Yamazaki/Getty Images
Japan is offering to pay families to move out of its overcrowded capital, in an effort to revitalize countryside towns and boost the falling birth rate.
Starting in April, families in the Tokyo metropolitan area, including those headed by single parents, will be eligible to receive 1 million yen ($7,700) per child if they move to less-populated areas across the country, according to a spokesperson from the central government.
The incentives apply to children aged under 18, or dependents 18 and over if they’re still attending high school.
It’s not the first time the government has tried to use financial incentives to encourage people to leave, but this plan is more generous at three times the amount currently offered.
For decades, people across Japan have migrated to its urban centers seeking job opportunities. Tokyo is the country’s most populous city, with roughly 37 million residents.
Before the Covid pandemic, the number of people moving into Tokyo outnumbered those leaving the city by up to 80,000 each year, according to government statistics released in 2021.
But this migration pattern, combined with Japan’s rapidly aging population, has left rural towns with fewer and fewer residents, as well as millions of unoccupied homes. More than half of the country’s municipalities, excluding Tokyo’s 23 wards, are expected to be designated as underpopulated areas in 2022, according to a national census.
Meanwhile, in major cities, space has rapidly run out and prices have skyrocketed. Tokyo is consistently one of the world’s most expensive cities to live in, ranking fifth globally in 2022.
Japan’s government has also made other efforts to address the population decline, including introducing policies in the past few decades to enhance child care services and improve housing facilities for families with children. Some rural towns have even begun paying couples who live there to have children.