Japan offers families tens of thousands of dollars to say goodbye to Tokyo

Every weekend, the playground in Tokyo’s Setagaya Park is full of children, and parents try to give them a place to go.

Space is always at a premium in this hugely popular city, but it’s hard for many to imagine moving to a more spacious area in Japan.

Giving people money to leave Tokyo is one way the Japanese government is trying to deal with the capital’s overcrowding and shrinking population in most of the rest of the country.

Past incentives intended to reverse the trend have been ineffective, so it will increase the money offered to families to 1 million yen per child (about Cdn$10,000) if they move from the Tokyo area to almost anywhere else in Japan for at least five years. .

Media reports say the new subsidy will be given in April, and will go on top of the roughly $30,000 in relocation support payments already available to people starting businesses, getting local jobs or working away from their new communities.

The offer attracted the attention of playground parents like Risa Kurokata. But she said the scheme was unworkable for families like hers.

“My husband is from outside Tokyo, but because of his job, it’s difficult to move,” said Kurokata, a hospital worker and mother of a young child.

“The head office is in Tokyo. It’s unrealistic for us to live outside the city.”

Japan’s demographic crisis is more severe outside Tokyo

Drawing families out of this sprawling metropolis has proven to be a daunting challenge for any successful government.

The United Nations ranks the Tokyo region as the largest urban agglomeration in the worldwith more than 37 million people living in the city and three surrounding prefectures.

About 30 percent of Japan’s population lives in Greater Tokyo area. By comparison, about 15 percent of Canadians call the Greater Toronto Area home.

This super-Density poses significant concerns, including the potential impact of a a big earthquakewhich is predicted to hit Tokyo in the next three decades.

But a pressing social problem continues to haunt the rest of Japan – an exodus of young people from less “cool” regional cities and countryside to Tokyo, long seen as the world’s center for Japanese business, politics and culture.

The demographic crisis is compounding the problem.

The overall population of the country, one of the oldest in the world, recorded its largest natural decline in 2021, as the birth rate reached a record low and immigration remained limited.

Japan’s rural towns and cities are aging and shrinking the fastest, shrinking the tax base, closing schools and leaving many municipalities on the brink of extinction.

Migration subsidies are not the ‘solution’

The incentive program began in 2019, and initially offered families in Greater Tokyo about $3,000 per child to move to some of the 1,300 participating municipalities, at half the cost, according to Kyodo News.

The effect is limited, with 2,381 people taking advantage of the subsidy in 2021.

Analysts like Keisuke Kondo believe the offer won’t lead to much more change.

“Migration subsidies should not be the main policy for regional revitalization or the solution to population decline,” said Kondo, a senior fellow at the Institute for Economic, Trade and Industrial Research, which has evaluated the incentive program.

Kondo says Japan’s traditional rigid labor structure, which forces people to commute on crowded trains to and from offices in Tokyo, is a major limiting factor.

“If the company offers a flexible new system [e.g. allowing more people to do remote work]workers will react and decide to move from Tokyo,” Kondo said.

He thinks the increased subsidy could attract some families with parents who can work at home and want to move to a new city with a lower cost of living or easier access to parks and nature.

Jobs are key, depopulation experts say

The current government’s goal seems like a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things: They want 10,000 people a year to take their money and leave the Tokyo area.

Anthropologist John Mock thinks the subsidies have “good intentions,” but says the impact of moving a few thousand families out of urban areas with tens of millions of residents is not a sensible solution.

Mock believes that the government has “put the cart before the horse” with the incentives, which he says is an insufficient amount of money considering the cost of moving with a family, and the difficulty of earning a living in rural areas of Japan, where income is limited. it is cheaper and employment is harder to find.

“If [governments] want to really follow this, it seems you have to do some serious things, for example, child care, urban development, get a job,” said Mock, an adjunct professor at Temple University Japan who has written about depopulation for 35 years in the country.

“Families will move if they can find work,” he said.

Small signs of a shift

Even without the increased subsidies, some groups say they have seen signs of small momentum.

The nonprofit organization Hometown Relocation Support Center, which connects city residents with local government, received a record 52,312 inquiries in 2022.

“Over the past 10 years, the majority of people who want to leave Tokyo are in their 20s to 40s,” said Hiroshi Takahashi, the group’s chairman. “Living in Tokyo and working for a big company is not everyone’s dream.”

The trend is also reflected in government data from 2020 and 2021, which shows that for the first time, fewer people are moving into Tokyo than out.

Some experts attribute this to an increase in remote work during the pandemic.

Others see it as part of a global shift, as people reevaluate the potential benefits of living in small communities, such as cheaper housing and a slower pace of life.

“I think it’s a reflection of a change in values,” said Susanne Klien, an ethnographer and associate professor at Hokkaido University, who interviewed 118 people for her book. Urban Migrants in Rural Japan.

The client is optimistic that rural Japan will become an “experimental ground for people” who choose to move, as the lower cost of living can “give them the opportunity to do what they want,” especially with fewer lifelong jobs available in Japan.

“There’s a lot of space in the countryside, and a lot of time because you don’t have to work as much,” says Klien, who doesn’t expect to see an explosion of urbanites abandoning Tokyo, but a slow outflow.