In a world first, the government in Tokyo, Japan, is launching an official dating app to address the country’s flatlining marriage and childbirth rates. The hope is to give a “gentle push” to the nearly “70 percent of people who want to get married” but aren’t “actively joining events or apps to look for a partner,” one government official told Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun.
Tokyo’s government isn’t taking matchmaking lightly: The app will entail a scrupulous registration process, in which users will have to provide documentation to prove they are “legally single” and willing to get married.
Alongside this, potential procreators will be required to produce 15 pieces of personal info—including height, occupation, and educational background—all of which will be visible to other users. And, just to make things extra romantic, an official tax certificate to verify their annual salary.
The city has already invested $1.28 million into the app, which is due to be launched this summer. It comes amid a population crisis that Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has called the “gravest crisis our country faces.” Births have fallen for the eighth year in a row to 758,631, a drop of around 5 percent.
In 2023, Japan had more than twice as many deaths as it did new babies.
The country is now one of the world’s oldest societies, with population projected to fall by another 30 percent to 87 million by 2070, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. The primary cause of this rapid decline is thought to be lower marriage rates.
In Tokyo, marriage rates are lowest of all, at 32 percent for men and 24 percent for women. In a press briefing earlier this year, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters that the next few years “will be the last chance to reverse the trend.”
“If there are many individuals interested in marriage but unable to find a partner, we want to provide support,” a Tokyo government official told The Asahi Shimbun. “We hope that this app, with its association with the government, will provide a sense of security and encourage those who have been hesitant to use traditional apps to take the first step in their search for a partner.”
Government-sanctioned Tinder may not sound like a meet-cute, but it does have a pretty big advantage: Commercial dating apps aren’t actually “designed to be deleted”—finding a long-term partner removes you from the customer base. Sorry to burst your bubble, but all those times you sadly re-downloaded Hinge were all part of the business model. Tokyo’s app really does have people’s best baby-making interests at heart.