This Japan town will pay you a million Yen to live there...on one condition

What's in a name? For a small town in Japan, a lot. The shrinking town of Kainan in Japan's Wakayama prefecture is offering people with a particular surname millions of Yen to relocate there. Do you qualify for the 'moolah,' here's all you need to know. 

How can I get the money?

To get ¥1 million (around $6,940), which just so happens to be the minimum reward, all you need is the surname 'Suzuki'. A further ¥1 million will be given for each child under 18 years of age.

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Why Suzuki?

Suzuki happens to be Japan's second most common surname. Furthermore, the town has a rather fascination association with 'Suzuki', it is the name's birthplace. 

Kainan launched the campaign to repopulate back in 2021. At the time, they estimated that around 750,000 Suzukis live in Tokyo and the neighbouring prefectures of Chiba, Saitama and Kanagawa.

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However, two years into the campaign, the town has failed to attract a single Suzuki, reports The Guardian.

Talking to the publication, Tomonari Fujita, head of the town’s urban development division, said: "I can confirm that not a single Suzuki-san has relocated to Kainan so far."

"One person made some initial inquiries, but it didn't go any further than that," he added.

Why is the town paying people to live there?

Across Japan, prefectures have been witnessing a steady decline in the number of residents. In 2022, the population of Japanese nationals fell by a record 800,000 to 125.4 million. 

On the other hand, the number of foreigners rose to a record high of almost three million, reports The Guardian.

As per the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research forecasts, Japan's population will fall to just 87 million by 2070.

In 2022, for the sixth year in a row, Japan witnessed a fall in its number of births. In 2021, the nation saw a 3.5 per cent fall from the previous year (2020). It had just 811,604 births, which is the lowest level on record, as per data by Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare. 

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In fact, this is the lowest number of births in the country's 123-year history; the country began keeping records in 1899, and the year 2021 saw the lowest numbers ever.

The country's total fertility rate, which is the number of children a Japanese woman will have in her lifetime, has also fallen by 0.30 points to 1.30 per woman.

Japan's fertility rate has witnessed a steady decline since 1975 when it first fell below 2.0.

Incidentally, if you were to look at news items on the nation's birth rates for the past few years, every year this record gets broken. Voicing concern, in May 2022, Tesla CEO Elon Musk had spoken about Japan's falling birth rate, warning that the country may soon "cease to exist" adding that it would be a great loss for the world.

On X, (known as Twitter back then), "At risk of stating the obvious, unless something changes to cause the birth rate to exceed the death rate, Japan will eventually cease to exist. This would be a great loss for the world."

(With inputs from agencies)