The government of Japan has been forced to scrap a controversial proposal offering cash incentives for urban women to marry rural men after the initiative was met with public backlash.
The plan involved giving single women from Tokyo up to 600,000 yen (around $4,260) to move to rural areas to address the shrinking female population in the countryside due to women moving to the cities for education and work.
The program covered travel costs for matchmaking events, in an attempt to address Japan’s record-breaking birth rates which, in 2023, reached the lowest in the country since 1899 according to data from the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare.
