Will Japan see more marriages with Tokyo’s taxpayer-funded AI-driven dating app or it is just ‘throwing money away’?

The Tokyo metropolitan government is playing Cupid with the city’s millions of unmarried residents, launching an AI-driven app to transform singletons into couples.

A test version of the app was launched late last year, with the full version of Tokyo Futari Story going live in the spring, the city said. The stringent registration process includes indicating one’s salary and paperwork to verify one’s single status, while artificial intelligence technology pairs candidates based on their specified values.

It would appear that there is a need for the new service, as the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research estimates that more than 32 per cent of men over the age of 50 living in Tokyo have never been married, along with 23.79 per cent of women, the Nikkei reported recently. For the two genders, those are the highest figures in every prefecture of Japan.

Critics, however, are not convinced that yet another dating app is the solution to singles’ problems, especially one funded by taxpayers. Instead, they suggest that the city and national governments do more to address the fundamental reasons why people are not getting married and having children.

One of the most frequently cited reasons why Japanese prefer to remain single and thus contribute to the country’s population decline is the lack of finances to marry and raise children.

In a statement to This Week in Asia, an official of the Tokyo government’s Citizen Life Department said a survey conducted in 2021 showed 70 per cent of people who wanted to get married were hampered from doing so because they did not know how to meet potential partners and were “not comfortable” using private matchmaking companies. The same survey, conducted in 2018, returned the