I hesitated writing this piece.
On the one hand, it’s the exact intersection of cultural issues, women’s issues, and language that I love writing about. On the other hand, it’s based off of a survey from a TV company that’s trying to drum up views for its reality-TV marriage show. And it doesn’t mind inventing unflattering new terms for women in order to do it.
Make no mistake: Japan’s marriage crisis is directly feeding its population decline. The marriage rate stands at just 505,656 as of 2025, the third-lowest post-war figure. (It went up last year – a promising sign, but too early to tell if it’s a trend.) Annual births also fell to a new record low for the 10th consecutive year.
As I’ve noted before, young people in Japan want to get married – over 63%, according to a Japanese government survey. Many, however, say they don’t know how or where to meet people. Another survey found that 80% of young people were exhausted by the never-ending hunt for their happily ever after.
Japan has tried to address this issue in any number of ways. For example, Tokyo Metropolis now runs its own marriage app, with logic built in to keep out cheaters.
Most of these plans, unfortunately, end up pushing the issue back on women. Cf. the now-defunct plan to pay women to go to the countryside to get married, which the government pulled after people complained it framed women as mere resources.
It’s in this context that I caught whiff of a Japanese TV station trying to push an awful new framing onto women that, essentially, blames them for Japan’s marriage crisis. The online reaction to the survey, however, somehow managed to be even worse than the survey itself.
Women have too many choices, says weird survey
The survey comes from online network ABEMA in an effort to promote its new marriage reality show, 時計じかけのマリッジ (tokei jikake no marijji), in which three women select a marriage partner within 30 days from a field of 30 “high-class” men. (Sounds lovely.)
The survey polled 3,000 unmarried women ages 20 to 39 via a Web poll. So a self-selected group, and hardly representative of all women. Still, the conclusions that ABEMA and its marriage consultant drew from this data sure are…something.
