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Japan

Tokyo's Government Is Building Its Own Dating App To Combat Falling Birthrates (time.com) 174

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Time Magazine: Called "Tokyo Futari Story," the city hall's new initiative is just that: An effort to create couples, "futari," in a country where it is increasingly common to be "hitori," or alone. While a site offering counsel and general information for potential lovebirds is online, a dating app is also in development. City hall hopes to offer it later this year, accessible through phone or web, a city official said Thursday. Details were still undecided. City Hall declined to comment on Japanese media reports that said the app will require a confirmation of identity, such as a driver's license, your tax records to prove income and a signed form that says you are ready to get married. According to Health Ministry data released on Wednesday, Japan's birth rate fell to a new low for the eighth straight year in 2023. "According to the latest statistics, Japan's fertility rate -- the average number of babies a woman is expected to have in her lifetime -- stood at 1.2 last year," reports ABC News. "The 727,277 babies born in Japan in 2023 were down 5.6% from the previous year, the ministry said -- the lowest since Japan started compiling the statistics in 1899. Separately, the data shows that the number of marriages fell by 6% to 474,717 last year, something authorities say is a key reason for the declining birth rate."
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Tokyo's Government Is Building Its Own Dating App To Combat Falling Birthrates

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  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday June 07, 2024 @06:23PM (#64531787)
    except paying people more and letting them work less hours.

    Seriously this is a country were they had so little consumer spending due to overwork that they created "Premium Fridays" to give workers time off.... and it was half a day off on *one* Friday a month... When I first heard about it I thought it was a joke...

    And they've somehow got worse wealth inequality than America. Now that's a joke. Though we've got them beat in most hours worked though...

    Bottom line, why the hell would you have kids just so you can pay someone else to raise them?
    • by taustin ( 171655 ) on Friday June 07, 2024 @06:29PM (#64531793) Homepage Journal

      There's other factors, too.

      People don't have children because they got married, they get married because they want to have children. If you want more children, change the social conditions that make them decide not to.

      An app isn't going to have any effect whatsoever.

      • I am agreeing too. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Brain-Fu ( 1274756 ) on Friday June 07, 2024 @07:23PM (#64531937) Homepage Journal

        Population collapse is happening all over the developed world. There is plenty of alarmism over it and an outright amazing refusal to even give a respectful nod towards the root causes.

        Of course, addressing the root causes directly WOULD involve, one way or another, a significant wealth transfer from the super rich to the middle and lower classes. Obviously, the wealthy hate this even more than they hate the end of our species, so all they can do is make token gestures and fix non-problems in an effort to keep the lower classes absorbing the full costs of raising children (in the face of a social and legal environment that is outright hostile to family).

        It would also require us to admit and address some uncomfortable truths. Truths so uncomfortable that typing them out gets you modded troll. So, I am not going to type them out. Maybe I will get the troll mod anyway, I don't know. But it involves a lot of misguided blamestorming as well as laws that give people serious and compelling incentives to stay single and never breed (since the institution of family, as it stands now, brings unacceptably high risk of utterly destroying your life).

        Meaningful change won't happen until it is far too late. Prepare yourselves, there is quite a storm ahead.

        • by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ) on Friday June 07, 2024 @07:38PM (#64531973)

          The root cause is not what you seem to think.

          This has been well studied.

          The 2 major factors in reduced birth rates are:
          1) improved wealth / standards of living (however you want to describe the average person being wealthier)
          2) women having more rights and education

          If you want more kids then you can take us back to the 1950s or ... well, that's about it. No country I'm aware has managed to reverse their ever declining birth rates despite all sorts of incentives and encouragement to have kids.

          If Africa ever gets it together, kicks out the US, EU and Chin's and builds a real home grown economy then their birth rates will drop, too.

          And frankly, why is this such a bad thing? Most of the world's problems are caused by too many people. A slowly declining global population is manageable even if it means some parts of the economy will be hurt.

          • https://data.worldbank.org/ind... [worldbank.org]

            Yeah if you look at the map here the trend is just unmistakable, all of Europe and NA are under 2 as well as large parts of SA and Asia as well and the list of countries with their chart is pretty striking, every country is sloping downwards.

            I do agree with the above sentiment though, in a world of increased automation and less scarcity we need to ensure good quality of life for kids if we are going to have less of them, quality over quantity as it were. Just gotta be caref

          • As you point out, when you empower women with more education and self determination, they determine they don't need to have more children and be bare foot in the kitchen.

            Unfortunately, we've not struck the right balance and (I hate to admit this) rsilvergun nailed it when he mentions that paying everyone more and letting us work fewer hours would go a long way towards giving people the stability they need to have more kids.

            I never really wanted kids and at 40, still don't have any. Part of this was growing

            • by vlad30 ( 44644 )

              Part of this was growing up poor and not wanting to bring a child into this world without really feeling like I could provide them with a good childhood and good prospects.

              I grew up poor right next to Housing commission (people given a house by the government living on benefits) I worked hard as did my parents and all of us moved into better areas and raised families It is your choice how to live your life and whether you move forward or stay in the past I'm not Hugh Hefner nor Elon Musk but I would never regret having children and do everything I can to make sure they can build on the foundation. Think about wealth is built up over generations It is rare in history that a p

            • by Kisai ( 213879 )

              The solution is to stop making countries "compete" on productivity, because that just sends jobs to countries that pay the least/treat their citizens like disposable trash the most This sentiment is also see in reverse, as visitors to said country often see the worst the country has to offer and wonder why the quality of life is insanely poor.

              If the law was that a domestic company may not pay a foreign company's employees less than they pay their domestic employees, you'd see jobs actually come back or a p

          • by vlad30 ( 44644 )

            No country I'm aware has managed to reverse their ever declining birth rates despite all sorts of incentives and encouragement to have kids..

            Australia did for a short time with the Baby bonus the problem it was short lived as an incentive and only encouraged predominantly younger women of low and average socioeconomic status to have multiple children and much of the money was wasted on plasma TV's . What society needs is those who are higher up the socioeconomic ladder to have more children that won't simply become another drain on government spending. One way this could be achieved by making children and their expenditure 120% tax deductible. s

            • > much of the money was wasted on plasma TV's

              I'm pretty sure Gerry Harvey didn't consider that money "wasted".

          • It seems like the average household now needs two adults working full time to make ends meet. Pointing a finger at women being educated seems disingenuous. Although I guess you could make the claim that if half the population was out of the work force, the other half would receive greater compensation due to the labor market needing to pay more.
          • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            1) improved wealth / standards of living (however you want to describe the average person being wealthier)

            It's the opposite of that. Young people can't afford a house, there are no jobs for life anymore, pensions are crap... They just can't afford to have children. What's more, conservatives are always moaning about people who can't afford kids having them, so the message is very clear.

            That's one of the major issues in Japan. Even if couples want children, they can only afford to have one. The government has been trying to help with some subsidised childcare, but the basic problem is that there is a very strong

        • Population collapse is happening all over the developed world.

          No it's not. At most, we have a much needed, very mild population decline. That's good news for everyone but the super rich.

        • by stikves ( 127823 )

          It it was just a few rich people causing problems, we could have solved this.

          It is more of systems designed to transfer wealth across generations, and discussing this is really a taboo.

          Again, even if you taxed "the rich" at 100%, or even took the wealth of all those people, systemic problems will not be solved. What are those problems?

          Housing, healthcare, education.

          And why are they broken?

          Housing is broken, because entire generations were duped into thinking their primary home is an "investment", and they t

      • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday June 07, 2024 @07:28PM (#64531955)
        but can't afford them. That's true in every developed nation. Now it's true they tend to stop at 2 or 3, but many are stopping at 0 and the rest at 1.
        • but can't afford them.

          People say that in surveys, but it doesn't match reality.

          In every developed country and most developing countries, the people having the most kids are those who can least afford them.

          Some countries offer money and other incentives for extra babies. But these have the perverse effect of lowering birth rates even more. Nearly every family accepting the money was already planning the baby regardless of the incentive, and the extra wealth causes them to have fewer additional children later.

          If we want people to

          • You've got it backwards though. Having a career interferes with having children but gives you high income. And everyone is told early on that a good education is the key to a good career (and later haha wrong degree). Basically, people choose between children and money, and often choose money. The ones who choose children (on purpose or by accident) get insane expenses and decades of responsibility.

            If you want people to have children (not that our planet needs more), then return to the old system where chil

            • pay people 18 years of daycare and the child's expenses, and you'll see a whole lot of willing parents.

              Nordic countries do that and have the same birth dearths as other developed countries.

              Korea provides generous subsidies for both daycare and stay-at-home parenting, yet Korea has the world's lowest birth rate.

              • Are you sure they don't pay only a tiny fraction of the expenses and opportunity costs of having a child? Say, for example, if Korea were to provide only 3 years worth of childcare, and well under 24 hours per day of it?

                • Are you sure they don't pay only a tiny fraction of the expenses

                  Rather than asking me, you could just Google the information in 20 seconds.

                  But have no fear. I invested 20 seconds of my time on your behalf, and lo and behold, Korea pays the full cost of daycare from birth to age three and then a subsidy of 220k KWN ($200 USD) per month until age five, when kids start school.

                  Yet they have a lower birth rate than ALL of the countries that pay nothing toward childcare.

                  Subsidies for children don't just fail to raise birth rates, they have the perverse effect of lowering birt

                  • Subsidies for children don't just fail to raise birth rates, they have the perverse effect of lowering birth rates.

                    I think it's backwards. Having fewer children makes the government desperate and increase subsidies.

                    Korea pays the full cost of daycare from birth to age three and then a subsidy of 220k KWN ($200 USD) per month until age five, when kids start school.

                    For some reason I think that raising a child (to good standards, not just to barely survive) costs more than $200/month. Which means that the child is still a large drain on resources.

                    • I think it's backwards. Having fewer children makes the government desperate and increase subsidies.

                      I mean the bill in question is named the "please make babies bill" or something along the lines. Who knows, if it keeps not being enough maybe someday they'll raise it to more than a tiny fraction of the cost of raising a child.

                    • the child is still a large drain on resources.

                      Yet those with the least resources are having the most children.

                      If "resources" were the problem, rich people would have the most kids. They don't. They have the fewest.

                      An increase in resources means people invest more in fewer children, which is the exact opposite of the subsidies' intent.

                    • Yet those with the least resources are having the most children.

                      Because for them the math is different.

                      In the US and the EU, people who are poor receive government welfare. People also receive welfare for having children. So, for someone poor, having a child is a good thing, because of the additional income. And, since they are poor anyway, there is no expectation to buy good clothes for the child etc.
                      Some people in my country have a lot of children just to get the payouts and spend them on alcohol. Obviously people like that do not work, so they can kind-of look after

                    • The most important resource that you need to raise a child is time, unemployed people have that in abundance. Also if you are poor and have children you get a significant (to you) amount of money to raise them, because you can't just let children die. If you are richer then you are on your own.

                  • How lucky that I guessed so correctly -- even guessing 3 years correctly. And as you found out, Korea's "please make babies" bill pays only a tiny fraction of the cost of raising a child.

                  • According to a Korean woman that I knew the reason why the birth rate in Korea is so low is because the women think the men are f****** sexist misogynist assholes and treat them very poorly, and most young women there really have no interest in marrying or having kids with them. It's the same in quite a few countries in the world where women have started to achieve equal rights, or are seeing those equal rights achieved by women in other countries and are using the most powerful force that they have availab

                    • the women think the men are f****** sexist misogynist assholes

                      That is because of education.

                      Lower their incomes, reduce their education, and they'll go back to having babies.

                      Niger has the world's lowest female literacy rate. Only 20% of women can read. Result: 6 babies per woman.

        • Facts argue with your polls. The poor are having more kids than the rich.

      • There's other factors, too.

        People don't have children because they got married, they get married because they want to have children. If you want more children, change the social conditions that make them decide not to.

        An app isn't going to have any effect whatsoever.

        Oh hell yeah, the Western world has undertaken a big social experiment in the last several decades. The base assumption is that no woman should be dependent on a man, that they can provide for themselves, and that a male is not needed.

        And it has succeeded, sort of.

        The problem was some of the false promises made along the way. That a woman can have it all, she can be a top leader in industry, can have children late in life, and if she wants to marry, that she can easily obtain a top male to fulfill her

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The base assumption is that no woman should be dependent on a man, that they can provide for themselves, and that a male is not needed.

          It's not. The base assumption is that nobody should be forced to stay in an abusive relationship, and it's mostly men who do the abusing. So men have to improve their behaviour, but some are unwilling to, or don't know how to, so think it's just a conspiracy to keep them from getting married.

    • by hey! ( 33014 )

      And they've somehow got worse wealth inequality than America.

      Judging by GINI this is not strictly true. I think there's something else going on, less of a gap between economic classes and more of a generational gap in economic opportunities.

      We're headed that way too, we just didn't have a kind of disillusioning watershed event like Japan's 90s financial crisis. Maybe for us it will have been the pandemic, but for young people in the US employment is looking transitory and housing costs are shockingly high.

    • Americans work longer hours than Japanese yet we have no problem maxing out credit cards like there's no tomorrow.

      You need a different cause.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • You can pay them not to work. Perfect plan!

    • by Kisai ( 213879 )

      Repeat after me:
      - Housing Prices drive Birth Rates down
      - Healthcare costs drive Birth Rates down
      - Food costs drive Birth Rates down.

      If Healthcare isn't free, or cheap enough (No America, your healthcare is astronomical compared to places in east/southeast asia), people stop reproducing because they can't afford the hospital stay, never mind the drugs.

      If Housing isn't affordable (Single Income, 35/hr week), then people don't have children because they don't have time or money for it.

      If Food isn't affordable,

  • by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Friday June 07, 2024 @06:36PM (#64531807)
    A dating service that actually works, i.e. brings people together so that they form stable relationships, is a terrible business idea. The business sets up the service & does all the advertising & promotion to attract clients only for them to find a partner & then stop using the service. How do they make any money out of that?

    On the other hand, if they don't want to make money & really just want to get couples together, it'd probably work.

    Yes, this is an indirect criticism of today's commercial dating services, i.e. they don't actually want their services to work or they wouldn't make any money.
    • Yes, this is an indirect criticism of today's commercial dating services

      Captain Obvious would like his cape back.

      • You'd be surprised how few users on /. can join up ideas like this.
        • You'd be surprised how few users on /. can join up ideas like this.

          I'll bite . . . how many?

          • Read the comments after comments that aren't completely explicit about what the author meant. Also, read the number of comments that are apparently responding to the opposite or something quite different to what the initial comment meant.
    • I'd say the government should setup this dating service, but how often does the government get anything right?

      • Well, you know every day, they get a lot of things right but it doesn't make headlines, except maybe during extraordinary times, e.g. pandemics & strikes.
    • But if a dating site is set up by the government to create new taxpayers/peasants/soldiers, the incentive is indeed creating marriageable relationships.

    • today's commercial dating services, i.e. they don't actually want their services to work

      There are techniques they use to prevent matches.

      One method is to post fake profiles of super-attractive people to build up false expectations.

      Why settle for an ordinary girl if twenty Victoria's Secret models are on the same page?

    • The most successful one here has a slogan that they lose customers two at a time. Contrary to Pharma, who are supposedly focused on finding ways to prolong life of cancer patients instead of finding a cure, online dating businesses aren't required for dating/finding a partner, so they don't compete with the dread of being alone forever, but with the effort and cost of using other services or not using any service at all. The business that has the best service will be the most successful, losing customers tw
      • What they typically do, as I understand it, is use "gamification" & operant conditioning strategies to keep users on the apps as much as possible & to make them as habit forming as possible. By giving randomly spaced rewards, i.e. matches with potential dates, they can augment the effects of the operant conditioning (if you've read your behaviourism scientific literature on the topic). They can pretty much keep many users hanging on with these strategies indefinitely or for at least long enough for
  • by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Friday June 07, 2024 @06:39PM (#64531819)

    It's cultural, and trying to put people together without changing the culture won't have the desired effect.

    People need time and resources to decide they're going to have children. It's not as simple as looking at average working hours and wages because of the way things break down, but for people working full time, a 60 hour work week with less than 9 vacation days a year is not unusual.

    Mandate a 40 hour standard week with a mandatory 50% wage premium for hours beyond that, and mandate a extra week of vacation after 5 years. Suddenly, those with full time employment will have time for families. Even that might not be enough to do more than slow the population decline - after all, I'm used to those standards and Canada's population is only growing due to immigration. Japan may need to move beyond the 40 hour 5-day week to a 32 hour 4-day week and maybe a base of 3 weeks of vacation.

    THAT is far more likely to help than a dating app.

    • Or maybe it's just not pleasant being Japanese and they don't want to bring more Japanese children into the world.

      Here in the US I know a number of people who don't want to bring children into the bleak future we're supposed to have but they aren't as extreme as the Japanese.

      • Or maybe it's just not pleasant being Japanese and they don't want to bring more Japanese children into the world.

        Then why are poor people having the most kids and rich people the fewest?

        Do the poor have a more pleasant life than the rich?

    • You're exactly right but they've pursued monetary policy that keeps profitability low without working people to the bone with low pay (considering hours worked).

      And they are not signaling an end to their crazy bond sales.

      This period is parallel to the declining birth rate but the MMT crowd will just claim ice cream sales cause crime.

  • by drainbramage ( 588291 ) on Friday June 07, 2024 @06:45PM (#64531835) Homepage

    A dating app can't fix this problem.
    I just did some research which required viewing Japanese porn.
    The problem is they have no genitals.
    Their mating parts are just a blurry mess!
    Was this caused by the Fuckoshima melt down?
    I bet it was.

  • Lets face it most of in the US really can't understand the full culture of any foreign country. One thing holds true though. If you overwork and underpay people. If you squeeze more of the pleasure from them they will stop having kids. They have so little and so little prospect for the future and these idiots in charge can't figure that part out because they are completely unwilling to give up any of the horde they have amassed.
    • And that explains why poor people in third world countries have the most kids. Because they see such a bright future.

    • If you overwork and underpay people. If you squeeze more of the pleasure from them they will stop having kids.

      Except that is the exact opposite of reality. The lowest-paid have the most kids. The highest-paid have the fewest.

  • It could also be that women who used to have a lot of kids were doing it somewhat involuntarily. Maybe they never wanted to have a bunch of kids, and now that birth control is available they don't have to. They are able to plan and wait for the "ideal" time. Also, in older cultures, there was not as widespread education about how women must be treated by men and vice versa. While there was male-female contact within the town, you didn't have books/movies describing and showing the ideal mate. Therefore ther

    • Let's be honest here, before the Internet, your potential dating pool was whoever you could meet in your various social circles. Now, you just keep swiping to find that "perfect" mate. We've boiled that shit down to sheer numbers and let's be honest, we all can't date a 10 but we keep telling everyone they deserve a 10.

  • Current dating websites are more interested in getting data to sell than connecting you up.

    If they ask for your music preferences, they don't care about you. Ask yourself - would you really refuse to marry a perfect ten that did not like your music?

    Unless you are in high school. Then it makes sense to base your dating on music.

    • IDK, I like going to concerts and I listen to reggae. I surely wouldn't want to tolerate a chick that listened to, say, Christian rock as her favorite music.

      So would this perfect 10 really be a 10 if they weren't compatible in that fashion? I may have to deduct a point or two!

  • by dmay34 ( 6770232 ) on Friday June 07, 2024 @07:17PM (#64531919)

    Dear Japan,

    You've tried a lot of things to get people to f**k. The only thing you haven't tried is limiting work hours for people under 40. If you passed a law legally limiting people under 40 to less than 40 hours of work per week -including commute- then people would have time to have kids.

  • by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Friday June 07, 2024 @07:22PM (#64531933)

    Before urbanization and industrialization children used to be cheap and easy to make (literally) labor. Being a mother also was the default role for women.
    Urbanization has caused the liberation of women and basically has turned children into (very) expensive pets. Unless somebody designs some new ideology or religion in which making children is a value in itself without the downside of any bronze age revelation cult, the global trend of declining birth rates is likely to continue until some new dark age emerge due to decade, decay and decline of modern civilisation. Environmental changes might help with that too.

    • Basically, we need all children to belong to the state and we pay women to have children and then any couple that wants to raise a child needs to sign up to receive a baby.

      Otherwise, yeah, we're going to need vast changes to things. I think we'll continue to see declining birthrates.

      Not really seeing that happen, at least not in the West.

    • The best thing that can happen to any economy is to have fewer people than there are jobs. Then the working class will get better lives as the employer class has to offer better and better incentives to get people to work for them. It's a bit like how electricity works. All the atoms have to compete for electrons.*

      ----------------

      * Yes, I know that's a gross oversimplification.

    • women took care of the kids, and they had them whether they wanted to or not, but it's not like they didn't also work.

      Folks have this idealized view of life back then because we really only think about the upper class. Lower class women didn't stay at home raising kids, they were doing a *fuckton* of work while raising kids.
    • by The Cat ( 19816 )

      Slow down there, captain. Save some of that nihilism for Reddit.

    • Unless somebody designs some new ideology or religion in which making children is a value in itself without the downside of any bronze age revelation cult

      Translation: "I actually see the empirical evidence that throwing out real religion was a bad idea, but I'm going to insist that it was a good idea anyway, because argle fargle."

  • Older people with more wealth are a burden. They require younger people to shoulder their existence. Easily personafied in a pension system that needs a growing population where there are more young people than old to work. You want to be taken care of in your ill health or pension years? Make sure there are plenty of young people. They will be the carers, tax payers and consumers creating demand for an economy that will afford to have you uselessly living on.
    • Older people with more wealth are a burden. They require younger people to shoulder their existence.

      IDK what country you are writing from, but in the UK we have pension systems. You (and your employer) pay a % of your income into a fund while you are younger and earning, then when you retire it is paid back in weekly or monthly installments like a salary. Of course, at any given time you can depict it as younger people paying directly for older people's pensions, but those younger people will have their turn when they get old.

      Ther are winners and losers. Someone who dies soon after they retire (actual

  • This causes deflationary pressure and neutralizes the argument that UBI will cause inflation. At the same time, the UBI(UHI?) will enable people to have more children. Another positive is anti-aging research will get a push because it HAS to fill the gap. Finally, fewer people in 1st world countries reduces a lot of CO2.
  • by John.Banister ( 1291556 ) * on Saturday June 08, 2024 @04:46PM (#64534089) Homepage
    People who decide not to have children make that decision based on their prediction of what life is like (for both them and the children) after they have the children. Making changes to aspects of life that are only important before they have the children won't help.
  • by juancn ( 596002 ) on Saturday June 08, 2024 @06:46PM (#64534305) Homepage

    For example, if you have three or more kids, you don't pay any taxes for 30 years. You get a 30% discount on the first one, another 30% on the second one and full pardon for the last one.

    Throw in some subsidized loans for couples first homes and I bet you could revert it fairly quickly.

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