Japan's Regional Revitalisation Migration Support Subsidy — Paying Households to Leave Tokyo

Since 2019, Japan's Cabinet Secretariat has run a relocation-support subsidy for households leaving Tokyo's 23 special wards (and, later, the wider Tokyo commuter belt) for one of around 1,800 eligible rural or regional municipalities, delivered through roughly 550 participating local governments as of December 2024. To qualify, applicants must take up local employment, start a business, or continue remote work for an employer outside the region, and commit to residing in the destination municipality for at least five years. The subsidy has grown over time: the per-child bonus was raised to ¥1,000,000, letting a family with two children claim up to ¥5,000,000 (about $32,000) in total, and the government further expanded eligible job categories — including agriculture, medicine, welfare and self-employment — from fiscal 2025.
Nikkei-reported uptake figures show the programme starting small and then accelerating during the pandemic: 71 households claimed the subsidy in 2019, rising to 290 in 2020 and 1,184 in 2021 as remote work became more widely accepted. Even at that peak, actual uptake remained well below the roughly 10,000 people a year that the government had hoped to attract out of the greater Tokyo area.
This gap is a useful caution on the limits of cash incentives for reversing urban concentration: as an academic analysis in The Conversation notes, Japan has run broadly similar rural-relocation subsidy schemes since 1953, and they have achieved only marginal success in redistributing Japan's population away from Tokyo, which together with its commuter belt still houses roughly 37 million people, about 30% of the national total. No rigorous, independent evaluation of relocatees' longer-term economic outcomes, or of whether the subsidy induces moves that would not otherwise have happened, was found; the figures available are participation counts rather than measured impact.

Read the full analysis: https://theconversation.com/japan-is-paying-families-1-million-yen-to-move-to-the-countryside-but-it-wont-make-tokyo-any-smaller-197551