Jan. 3 (UPI) -- Japan is offering families who live in Tokyo 1 million yen ($7,500) per child to move out of the capital and into other towns and villages.
The new offer represents an increase of over 300% from the old offer of 300,000 yen. It will be introduced in April as officials try to revive areas with declining birthrates and aging populations.
The program is part of Japan's Infrastructure Development Plan for a Digital Garden City Nation, which is aimed at regional revitalization through the promotion of relocation to rural areas by means of digitization.
Those moving also have to meet one of three conditions: employment at a small or midsize company in the area they relocate to, continuing their pre-relocation work via the Internet or starting a business in their new area of residence.
According to Nikkei Asia, relocation support was provided to 1,184 families in fiscal 2021, rising from 290 in 2020 and 71 in 2019. Officials hope that the program will help reduce pressure on public services in Tokyo, which has a population of 35 million.
The government is hoping 10,000 people will have moved from Tokyo to rural areas by 2027, it added.
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The Japanese government recruits mostly completely unqualified English teachers from abroad and sends them all across the country. The ones that go to the cities are considered lucky and a ton of the ones who get sent to rural locations burn out and break their contracts.
Xenophobia is one part of it for sure, but the sheer isolation of living somewhere where close to zero people speak your language is incredibly socially isolating.
:100-com: While I loved living in Japan I also absolutely hated it as time went on. I had decent Japanese and I improved substantially with immersion so I could talk to people, but living in a somewhat rural part of the country meant that I was like one of 3 white people in the city. Part of my problems were just the sheer cultural clash especially since I was an edgy 4chan teen at the time, but the isolation got rough. My host family was very overbearing and there was a huge fight when my mother sent a laptop over because they didn't want me to have any English exposure. That laptop let me finally talk to my mother for the first time in months though. Talking to people back home made me finally realize that I was in a relatively abusive situation. A lot of the students at my school treated me like a curiosity at first but wanted nothing to do with the actual me and would try to just get me to do stupid stuff which I would do hoping to fit in only to further ostracize myself.
And then I started the process of realizing I was trans which was absolutely wonderfully an amazing thing to start in a foreign country where Haruna Ai was a punching bag for jokes and my host family never properly gendered her.