EN-ICHI Opens Up the Future of Family and Community
[Info. File] Local Governments’ Marriage Support Initiatives
Training Volunteers, Life-Design Seminars, and More
It is often pointed out that the leading driver of declining births is the rise in non-marriage among young people. Across Japan, local governments are rolling out initiatives to support young people in getting married.
Additional Municipal Approaches
Backing local measures is the national Priority Grant Program for Regional Measures to Address Declining Birthrates (Marriage and New Life Support Project). Funds are used for municipal efforts to promote marriage, foster a society supportive of marriage, pregnancy/childbirth, and childrearing, and for “Marriage and New Life Support” subsidies that help newlyweds cover rent, moving costs, and related expenses.
Within marriage-support programs, municipalities are implementing: "online marriage consultations and accompaniment-style support," "training of marriage-support volunteers and other human resources,""upgrading matching systems using AI," and "life-design seminars for younger generations."
Source: Compiled by the author
According to case studies posted on the Children and Families Agency website（こども家庭庁） for FY2023—see “Regional Priority Grants for Measures to Address the Declining Birthrate: FY2023 Casebook”（『地域少子化対策重点推進交付金 令和５年度事例集』）—the following examples are highlighted:
Ishikawa Prefecture trains “matchmaking volunteers”（縁結びボランティア） who introduce partners, host meeting opportunities, and provide follow-up; it also introduced a new AI matching system supported by volunteers.
Oita Prefecture established an Encounter Support Center that offers matchmaking services and marriage-oriented seminars, and has likewise adopted an AI-based matching system.
For comprehensive life-design seminars targeting young people, Gunma Prefecture engages university students from the planning stage, publishes booklets for youth, runs life-design classes where university and high-school students learn together, and builds a regional collaboration framework to support young people’s life planning.
Kyoto Prefecture runs programs in which participants visit child-rearing families employed by local companies to learn from them, and holds workshops using original teaching materials to help students and junior staff think through life design.
As a community-wide marriage support network, Niigata City brings together companies and organizations to form a marriage support network and issues passports that allow engaged couples and others to access participating companies’ services—aiming to convey that business, community, and government are cheering on marriage.
Additional Municipal Approaches
Where these projects are underway, themes include training and networking marriage-support volunteers and inter-municipal collaboration. Akita and Shimane Prefectures emphasize cross-regional exchange so that entire regions can work together on marriage support. Nagasaki Prefecture is strengthening inter-municipal cooperation by setting up matchmaking system counters and identifying/training marriage-supporters. Mie Prefecture, through cooperation between the prefectural government and multiple cities/towns, is creating wider-area opportunities to meet.
When municipalities were asked what tangible effects their past anti-decline measures had produced, the most common answer was an increase in the share of residents who feel their community is childrearing-friendly（prefectures: 13〔27.7%〕, municipalities: 363〔25.0%〕）, whereas “an increase in the number of marriages” was far less common（prefectures: 1〔2.1%〕, municipalities: 56〔3.9%〕） （Cabinet Office, Survey on the Status of Local Governments' Measures to Measures to Combat Lower Birth in FY2021: 内閣府『令和3年度 地方自治体における少子化対策の取組状況に関する調査』）.
These are initiatives whose results take time to emerge, and future developments bear close watching.
(Published with additions and revisions in the November 2023 issue of "EN-ICHI FORUM")
