The Tokyo metropolitan government has announced that it will soon be in the online matchmaking business. It is launching a dating app, which will hopefully appear in the summer, its latest attempt to get people to do their duty to the nation by finding a partner, getting married and procreating ASAP.
The rules of the app will be a bit stricter than most commercial equivalents – you will be required to submit documentation establishing you are single and sign a pledge stating that you are willing to get married. It’s not Tinder. You’ll also need to attend an interview and provide a tax slip to indicate your salary.
Companies here increasingly pander to the singles market
And that’s not all, as well as establishing your marital aspirations, you will need to enter 15 items of personal information including height, background, and occupation, which will be disclosed to potential suitors – along with a photo ID (it’s unclear who’ll see that). It will apparently be a fee-based system but we don’t know how much it will cost yet.
The move has been endorsed by none other than Elon Musk, an amateur demographer and Japanophile who was one of the first to draw attention to his favourite travel destination’s population crisis in a 2022 tweet. Musk foresaw a day when the Japanese would ‘cease to exist’ as a result of the falling birth rate. Last year there were twice as many deaths as births in Japan and the population is currently in free fall dropping by about 2,000 people a day. Marriages are out of fashion too: falling to 474,000 last year from 504,000 in 2022.
This is all scary stuff but the figures alone are not especially remarkable in the modern world. The UK’s are hardly any better, though we compensate, controversially, with mass immigration. What causes real panic here is the belief that Japan has a unique culture, which it is commonly supposed, only natives are capable of understanding and sustaining. When your language is spoken only in Japan, population decline is that much more serious – existential in fact. The Japanese and their culture could go the way of the Mayans.
Government intervention in the dating game sounds like a desperate response, but it isn’t unprecedented and, in many ways, the app is a logical step. Municipalities have been organising match-making events for years and there is a counselling service for lovebirds advertised on the government website.
As for central government, it’s has been offering all sorts of inducements to singletons such as free childcare, paternity as well as maternity leave, and a free house in the country if it’s Tokyo’s cramped living conditions and high rents that are putting you off settling down. Matchmaking has a long tradition in Japan with ‘omiai’ (arranged marriage) being how many elderly citizens in Japan found their partners, and some still do. A more modern variant ‘gokon’ (a form of group blind dating) is popular with students.
The reaction from the public has been mixed, though. Elon may be impressed but online responses here have questioned whether this is an appropriate use of taxpayer’s money. Many are wondering whether it will work. The government imprimatur may be a stumbling block. If there is something a bit naff about finding a partner through a dating app (or am I hopelessly old-fashioned?) there is surely something naffer still about doing so on a government dating app.
It could be too that the app idea misses the point. Channels for online courtship are hardly in short supply and it’s arguably never been easier to find someone (though one of the benefits of the government app is that you should have more chance of finding a genuine marriage seeker). The real challenge is persuading people to make a lifelong commitment, in a world of increasingly uncertain work prospects and hectic schedules.
Another problem is that companies here increasingly pander to the singles market and images of women doing very well indeed without partners or children dominate advertising. One long-running ad on Train TV, which is representative and mesmerises commuters every day, shows a beautiful woman in a spacious apartment, cooking for herself, polishing her surfboard on the veranda, and then leaving for work (with a hard hat suggesting she’s an engineer or coal miner) before returning home to luxurious and very much single bliss in her immaculate, uncluttered living space. That’s the ideal. Few ads for anything show large families.
As for entertainment, young pop and TV idols are forbidden from marrying or even dating for fear of disappointing their fans. And in the soppy TV dramas there is romance, and discreetly portrayed sex, but rarely storylines that culminate in good old-fashioned nuptuals. Gay storylines are in vogue too: the most popular TV show on now is a romance between a lawyer and a hairdresser. The theme is food – they cohabit and cook up delicious meals. The kids are out of the picture.
The government will have its work cut out then. The app plan reminded me of Rishi Sunak’s national service wheeze – and starting a family is beginning to feel like a form of national service – a nice idea in theory but not practical and probably, sadly, doomed to failure.
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