>

Also try living there as a non-Japanese. The luster will wear off real quick!
All the jobs are in Tokyo, so people live in Tokyo or the surrounding prefectures. Now they’re paying people to leave Tokyo and the surrounding prefectures. Where will these people work, then? Japanese companies dislike WFH for, among other reasons, the same archaic reason they all set up shop in Tokyo instead of in other cities: overemphasizing relationships rather than getting the job done.
Try forcing companies out of Tokyo first. Then you might see the population density ease up, up populations of other cities balance out. >

To be fair, there is very decent public transportation in Japan so it wouldn't be terrible. >

It absolutely would.
You can’t just hop on a bullet train and go to work. A ticket costs more than a days wage.
If it’s possible on normal speed trains then it’s probably already inside a massive urban sprawl that doesn’t need population. >

Most rail commuters buy some sort of unlimited pass, prices I've seen for 1-6 month passes come to around 9,000-15,000 yen/month ($68-115)
Which is much cheaper than the 1-time tickets you're referring to. 
For students it's free or at least pretty cheap. >

That's the normal train. Do you want to sit/stand 2 hours to get to work in another city and 2 hours more to go back home, everyday? >

I've personally driven longer commutes (slightly more than 2.5h each way). 
And I didn't get paid for that commute, car, insurance, fuel, maintenance, I had to pay for it all.
And it was a heck of a lot more expensive than ~$100/m
People have different levels of tolerance for inconvenience. >

that mean your works days you had no life at all, why did you have done that to yourself? do you hate yourself or something? >

Being homeless is worse than a long commute. >

1 million yen equals $7,696.65 USD >

Arguably has more buying power compared to US living costs tho >

Idk Japan wasn't quite cheap for me but I'm European. Especially housing (they don't have much space). In Tokyo, you can easily pay $50 a night in a room as big as a coffin >

Though this offer is to leave Tokyo...I wonder if it's cheaper once you leave one if the largest metro areas in the world. >

There are literal ghost towns in Japan which is the result of younger generations leaving to head to cities for better opportunities.
Pretty sure you'd be able to buy a place in these areas pretty cheap as they'd be crying out for residents again >

There are ghosts towns everywhere from young people leaving for cities. It's been happening since cities started (called rural exodus) and has accelerated since the industrial revolution and even more so in the modern age.  
These places usually are cheap to buy property but the problem is everything else. Internet access, schools, hospitals, transport links, even access to supermarkets and just good old entertainment can all be hard to come by (if at all) and of dubious quality.  
It's a very difficult problem because the logical answer is to add things like schools and hospitals and better links. But... how many resources do you commit to this? A school in a place with no (or very few) children? A hospital to a place that is going to serve less than 10% of the people it could serve in a city? What kind of economic engine would these places even have beyond agriculture and related industries?
And ofc this is a self reinforcing cycle that is very hard and very expensive to break (if it can be broken at all, because people all over the world like tk live in cities, and near the coast, and near other people) >

I thought the solution was simply to leave the metropolis for its outskirts, not for an abandoned village in the boonies.
If you leave the big city for the suburban outskirts, with good enough public transportation, you can maintain a job in the city--though depending on the size of the city probably not its center.
The problem is the idea of 'centralization', a couple of neighborhoods in a city where every business wants its office. Big enough companies often don't rent an office there but get their own building somewhere else that's close enough, but either way, at least for example in Tel Aviv, too many businesses are vying for the areas around Sarona and people are vying to get prestigious jobs there.
The solution is to incentivize businesses to build offices away from the city center, making it much easier for people living outside the city center to reach there. In this way, the city effectively expands, new city 'centers' come up, and the process repeats. But I always considered this good enough personally so long as the govt works hard to make sure this happens well.
From the outskirts, it's harder to reach those places, but it's not unrealistic. So yeah, a bus to school instead of walking there. It's a significant change, but it's not insurmountable, and can be realistically dealt with, which is great when we don't live in an ideal world.
Edit: And all this means nothing when after opening the article, I read they're referring to 'Greater Tokyo', not Tokyo. Looking at a map I'm assuming this is clearly including all metropolitan areas including suburban edges, not just the big cities themselves. It looks like the Japanese govt isn't asking them to move to the edge of the metropolitan area, but to completely give up on any job in the Greater Tokyo area. I could be wrong though. >

That's basically the process that we've been having for a long time now though, and leads precisely to the bit about overcentralisation. Which, I don't see how you can avoid it at all, even if you can ease some of its aspects.  
I definitely agree that good transport links are absolutely essential but even Japan is struggling with this and they have excellent public infrastructure. So there's clearly limitations to this approach too (even if it's the best we have so far) >

If the reasons why these areas are depopulating to begin with aren't fixed then this scheme will be an abject failure. Who would relocate one's household in a jobless, shopless, serviceless area? >

Jobs, services and shops often spring up around people. So encouraging people to move to those regions is a start in fixing these issues. >

It isn't like you can just dump 50,000 people in a region and expect businesses and jobs to immediately open to support them all. Jobs need to exist for people to move, or the government has to do more than a one time payment to support them. With steady stream income, some can focus on building businesses, but it is a long process. It takes years or generations for strong growth in specific regions because jobs, businesses, and population grow hand-in-hand, not chicken and egg. Only significant and sustained welfare and investment from the government can speed up the process >

I'm pretty sure this is historically how migration has worked, prior to the modern era. >

No. Towns and cities always formed in generally advantageous positions over time. States that had enough wealth could fuel colonies, like Phoenicia founding Carthage as a trade colony, but it required sustained effort over generations to support and grow them. And that trend holds true today. At no point in humanity's lifespan could we just chuck hundreds or thousands of people, completely unsupported or with a one time purchase, and expect it to work.
The Japanese government is giving people the equivalent of ~7,600 USD to move to a new town where they will have no support network (friends and family), job opportunities (what use is a software engineer in a farming town way up in the mountains?), and limited housing and amenities. It is a doomed prospect >

Nobody is founding new towns in 2000BC with 1m Yen. You really didn't need to double down on this. >

People founded towns around resources which created business, that's why rivers and bodies of water were such common locations for ancient civilizations and that's why there are so many mining towns that are ghost towns now. You can't just move into the middle of nowhere and create a community from nothing. >

Again, to reiterate, nobody is founding a new fucking town. >

your thinking is too dense and too fixated on semantics.
His idea applies the same to towns and prefactures outside of Tokyo. Dumping people in those places with no natural economic opportunities is akin to creating towns from thin air. That is what he means. >

"I'm going to pay you ¥1m to fuck off" >

Haha was looking for this comment! >

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 80%. (I'm a bot)


Japan's government is offering ¥1m per child to families who move out of greater Tokyo, in an attempt to reverse population decline in the regions.
Although Tokyo's population fell for the first time last year- a trend partly attributed to the coronavirus pandemic - policymakers believe more should be done to lower the city's population density and encourage people to start new lives in "Unfashionable" parts of the country that have been hit by ageing, shrinking populations and the migration of younger people to Tokyo, Osaka and other big cities.
Officials hope the generous sums on offer will encourage families with children aged up to 18 to revitalise regions and ease pressure on space and public services in greater Tokyo, the world's biggest metropolis with a population of about 35 million.


Extended Summary | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: family^#1 population^#2 Tokyo^#3 year^#4 new^#5 >

I personally think the no-brainer way to deal with this is to increase incentives for companies to allow employees to work from home. For many jobs commuting is a completely unnecessary waste of time, and since many people working in Tokyo commute for over two hours one-way, they would be thrilled to stay home in their less populated and more affordable home cities. 
Sadly Japan is one of the last countries in that world that will adopt WFH, so here we are offering money to people to move. >

They had widespread teleworking during the pandemic, but like the Big Tech companies in the U.S., a lot of Japanese companies have gone back on their word for teleworking and forced everyone to come in again.
It's purely office politics. They have so many middle managers who failed upwards and were promoted based on seniority even though they don't do jack shit, and there was more scrutiny into what they were doing all day. Given that a lot of these guys are in their 50s and 60s, they couldn't adapt to managing people they couldn't see, or understand online mechanisms, so they made return-to-office mandatory for THEIR own survival to show their bosses they were actually useful to the company. They're not. They're pantomiming for 8 hours a day, but it's somehow accepted here.
Also there's this weird stigma for people who telework now, in my experience. It's like you're not actually an employee because you're not in the office for the manager to look over your shoulder every 10 minutes--it's like being a temp worker. And it's working counter to what the government wants. >

idk but every workplace I've ever been at in canada had "old guy who does nothing" with the possible exception of "complains" >

Only 1 Million? This law is designed to get rid of poor people from their capital. >

What? It’s nothing of the sort. Have you travelled around rural Japan?
They’re facing a massive issue but population shrinkage and all the higher paying jobs being located in the cities is only half of the problem. 
The majority of towns turning into ghost towns and dying out completely over the next decade is a real fear of not reversing. 
If Japan wasn’t so fascinated with working from the office and anything else not doing your civil duty and the government gave benefits to companies to implement work from home and there was a mindset switch they might be able to end the erosion.
Oh and maybe convince people to have sex again after they sort the first issue out to. >

American's probably see $7,000 and don't understand relocating for that little.  Even at $14,000 say two kids, half could be eaten up just getting a new apartment for the first month.  The rents and home prices in japan are probably substantially less then in the US. >

Housing costs are far cheaper in Japan. Housing hasn't been an investment vehicle for the past 30 years, unlike in many western countries. You could get a home in Tokyo proper for 250,000 pretty reasonably
Rural housing is nearly free at this point due to the rapid urbanization of the population leaving so many homes in rural areas unsold >

move to the country they said...it will be fun they said...there's about a 0% chance to be eaten by a gang of wild boar demons they said >

This is the kind of policy where politicians pretend to do do something, knowing that this policy will fail. But this failure will bring a lot of publicity to them, and show that they ttry to do "something".
Just to try to draw attention from changes and policies that government would need to implement to make a real change. 
Whenever they will feel the heat they just throw million yen fish to people.
And - if for some unforseen reason this policy will work - they will just close down the program citing fiscal reasons. >

Isn't 1 million yen around ₹5 Lakhs INR? 
That couldn't even get you a small roadside rundown shack. >

Who wants to be a millyenaire? >

That's approximately $7,000 USD and not even enough to cover the cost of a new vehicle that would be necessary to leave the city. >

They have trains in Japan >

They have excellent train coverage in their degree cities. But Japan is the size of the US Eastern Seaboard. Not everywhere has that kind of coverage. >

Japan has extremely good transportation coverage. Even after living there a while, I never needed a car to get anywhere
Even remote rural hot spring villages will have a bus going in and out >

And that's nice to get tpeople in and out. But what happens when you live there? Like what happens when your kid is sick and you need to go to the next town over to get some cough syrup? If your going to raise a family, good isn't good enough. >


get some cough syrup

Family Marts are everywhere. >

You can fill in get cough syrup with anything really. >

It's literally a convenient store that sells all necessities, and it takes on average like 15mins WALK to a supermarket. You have no idea what you're talking about, this is a complete waste of time. 
Go on have your last words, I'm out. >

You don't know what you are talking about. Family marts are everywhere in the highly walkable cities, not in rural areas, and those don't stay open all night. It's straight up foolish to live in the suburbs without a car. >

Yes, there are convenience stores even in rural areas. Yes they're open 24/7 (which is actually a bit of a problem since it's not profitable, but that's a different discussion)
It's foolish to live in the suburbs without a car in the US (even though I did it for years), because the infrastructure only exists for cars. Japan is not the same, it's perfectly reasonable to do. Feel free to go to any of the JET subs and ask them how the majority of them managed to live without a car in suburban and rural areas. The go out and see the world before you make such incorrect blanket statements
It is most certainly you who doesn't know what he's talking about >

Is 1 million yen worth the long term benefits of living in Tokyo? >

It's less than 10k USD so no. You'll likely need to own a car depending on how rural the place you are moving to. >

Tokyo is too crowded, so real estate prices have skyrocketed, which directly translates to an increase in the cost of living. No one can afford to have children because every establishment—restaurants, shops, parlors, gyms, etc.—must pay higher rent. >

Wat? There are many parts of Tokyo that are quiet, quite cheap and suburban. Even in the main 23 wards. You are aware how big Tokyo actually is right? There’s places that feel more like living in the countryside that are still actually in Tokyo. 
Hell I live in central Tokyo and once you go down a few small streets you’re in a quiet neighborhood. I pay around $1400 a month for a 3 bedroom house. It’s great. Most foreigners get their incorrect perception of real estate prices from English speaking estate agents or “foreigner friendly” ones that rip people off. >

Thats pretty cheap rent >

Tokyo's post-bubble housing policies are absolutely incredible, and have essentially prevented it from seeing the same scale of housing crisis that other major metros are dealing with today.
"To boost construction and lower prices, national leaders redoubled efforts to allow more homebuilding. They turned, especially, to administrative changes to the building codes. “To help the economy recover from the bubble, the country eased regulation on urban development,” Hiro Ichikawa, a development advisor to builders, told Robin Harding of the Financial Times. “If it hadn’t been for the bubble, Tokyo would be in the same situation as London or San Francisco.
Among a long series of administrative changes that national leaders made were, in 1994, a rule that excluded basements from the formula for calculating permitted indoor floor area—in essence, allowing buildings to be one floor taller. In 1997, common areas stopped counting toward floor-area limits in condominiums. In 1999, to speed the review process for building permits, Japan began allowing private consultants to authorize permits. In 2001, Prime Minister Koizumi introduced a sweeping new Urban Renaissance policy for economic recovery that created a fast-track around local control to authorize new high-rise developments in city centers. The year 2003 brought more floor-area expansions and an alternative to slant-plane restrictions called the “Sky Exposure Criterion,” which gave builders flexibility about how they protected sunlight for their neighbors. The stepwise process of welcoming more homes has continued." >


Tokyo's post-bubble housing policies are absolutely incredible

Did you mean to link to a tweet that simply says "yes"? >

Good catch! Edited >

Go watch bald and bankrupts latest video of him visiting Japan and it’s pretty self explanatory >

Wasn't West Virginia trying to get Americans to move there for something like 8kUSD? >

That's not even 8 grand USD. >

Or just make those undesirable areas desirable. This is stupid as fuck... >

Lol, they should just open up immigration and get over their racism or else the country will die of old age. >

Would opening their borders to foreigners help with the population crisis? 
Obviously I know that the Japanese govt. would rather eat glass than to let that happen, but I personally don't see any other way other than readjusting their entire culture and views (specifically towards work,  relationships, etc) as they know it. >

That’s not the only issue right now, and the point of this is not to combat population issues across the whole of Japan, but more that all the young people are leaving rural areas for urban areas. Opening Japan to foreigners doesn’t help that issue, because most of them really wouldnt want to live in those rural places anyway.
Japan will let itself die before it realises that it needs a major cultural shift to save this shit. >

Impossible. The geniuses built their entire country around one city. Almost every major company is located in Tokyo, leaving Tokyo would be financial suicide for most people. >

Luckily their economy is service focused and can be mostly digitized, meaning there is no reason to stay in the city and it wouldn't be financial suicide. >

Can doesn't mean that it will. The Japanese are afraid of change, they still use Fax machines there, and I can name a bunch of other things that they do/use that are obsolete in the west. >

"still use fax machines there". My brother in christ have you been to a US financial or medical institution? >

No, I'm from Europe. >

Even in Europe Fax machines are still common. See Germany >

I am not from Germany >

My point was as backwards as fax machines are, lots of countries still use them, and it is bold to base the „backwardness“ of a culture solely on that >

Where did I say it was backwards to use them? And where did I say that was the sole reason? You seem to be reading what you want, instead of reading what I say. >

Japan really has the opportunity to become the blueprint for how aging societies should look to the future.
Focus on spreading out your population. Depopulate urban areas, encourage migration to country areas. A lot of people would love to move out of the city if it weren't for the lack of career opporunities. Japan has reliable high speed internet all over the country and a robust bullet train system to easily accomodate for remote work and the odd trip to the office.
But no, lazy old fart politicians will continue the pageantry of appearing like they're doing something and going on record that this was their stance. "Look I tried! It's now the people's fault they decided to stay in Tokyo, I even waved some money in their face and they said no". >

On the other hand, what kind of jobs will be available once you move to new place?  I suppose if your job allow telecommute it might not be a bad idea to take the government's offer. >

Rural living is unsustainable and undesirable for the future of humanity. Governments need to accept this and plan accordingly. >

The clever idea surely came from over 60 politicians desperately trying to attract people. >

I really hope that longer-living populations don’t end up as a curse in disguise due to generational friction. >

Can I move to Japan and take the 8 grand and go live in an abandoned building somewhere? >

Pure laziness on the governments part.  Throwing money at the problem won't work.  There needs to be a plan to reinvigorate rural areas.  People move to economic centers (cities) for a reason. >

How about trying to deal with your Xenophobia and try welcoming migrants to Japan. >

The issue is shrinking rural areas. Migrants would have an almost impossible time integrating into a small rural Japanese village >

I don't know, I watched Totoro once and really liked it. >

Nikkou is nice :D  Fujikawa too.  If Japan wasn't so ethnocentric and invited in more Japanese speaking foreigners, I'm sure they could fill up some of the countryside.  Maybe they could start an international match-making service.  Japan is a beautiful country, and the people are lovely. >

Are there that many foreigners who speak Japanese? And is the issue with migration regulations or cultural xenophobia? >

Probably not, but the culture and language is super popular because of games and anime etc.  I was an exchange student there, I'm very surprised they haven't specifically sought out former students and temporary workers to come back to be honest.  There just isn't the same feeling of patriotism by borders in some countries like Japan.  It's more like patriotism of blood.  It would be like if someone came up to me and said I don't have enough Native American blood to be a REAL American.  Not everyone feels that way, but a lot of them have a lot of passive prejudice.  It isn't coming from a place of hate usually, just that the minorities are usually visitors there and not a lot of other ethnicities are born as Japanese citizens. >

Immigration seems like Japan's only hope tbh (as much as they don't seem to want it), I don't see a world in which the Japanese will start wanting big families quick enough to reverse the demographic cliff they are about to fall off. >

Any contenders as to what population groups would be willing to not only move but also to integrate? Don't think this approach should be taken lightly, given that it requires people to leave their home country, culture and people behind. >

People do it all over the world, just not in Japan because it's not really an option. I think there are plenty of people struggling who would welcome the opportunity to live in a safe, modern country and be willing to integrate. Will it be tough and cause some issues, of course - but it seems better than your culture & society dying of old age imo >

There's still plenty of people. It's not like they're going to run out of people. I don't see Japan accepting immigration as a solution any time soon. >

Unpopular opinion: population shrinkage could be reversed if they allowed real immigration. >

I think they’ve tried but people don’t want to move there for whatever reason. >

I'm fairly certain they've never offered a path to real citizenship for anyone not of japanese ancestry.  I wouldn't go either if I couldn't be a citizen. >

Please don't kill Tokyo before I get to visit, the absolutely crowded and always alive city even on a Monday at 4am is what makes it special. >

Just import weebs, you’ll have a sprawling metropolis again in no-time flat >

I think they need them to reproduce...so that's out >

Do Japanese companies offer work from home packages? I could see it being very nice if you could. >

Boom time for moving businesses >

How hard is it to move some of the offices and factories of big companies out of Tokyo? >

Very.
Anything that isn’t a major city already is farmland or in the mountains.
Japan has very little usable land compared to actual size. Most of the country is mountains >

Add a zero then maybe...and it better be tax free. >

I wish my city would do this. >

Is actually kinda funny. There's an Instagram account that posts listings of cheap houses in Japan and they mostly look really freaking nice for like $50,000. The apparent downside is that they're like 45-60min commute by train to Tokyo... But I stop and think "Dude I did that everyday for like 10 YEARS living here in the US anyway!"
It legit made me wonder what it would be like to just fuck off and buy a house in "rural" Japan. >

Yeah you’d think differently once you remember those trains shut off every night. 
And those houses look nice but actually are built like garbage with zero insulation and no soundproofing.
And will depreciate in value more than a $50,000 car.