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The story
Former House of Councillors member and current rakugo performer GaaSyy updated his X account by September 20, 2026, posting: “We need a multi-spouse marriage system based on income, or Japan’s declining birthrate won’t stop.” He argued that if someone earns 20 million yen a year, they should be allowed two spouses — boosting tax revenue and the number of children while cutting down on infidelity and affairs. On 5channel, reactions ranged from cool dismissals like “You can basically already do something like this on your own” and “This is too unrealistic to bother debating,” to more sympathetic takes such as “There’s a side to this where the haves support the have-nots.” Opinions were split over how realistic this would be as a birthrate countermeasure and what benefits it might actually offer men and women.
Influencer GaaSyy, a former Upper House lawmaker who also works as a rakugo performer, updated his X account by the 20th, bringing up the idea of a “multi-spouse marriage system.”
[Photo] The former Upper House lawmaker’s new look
GaaSyy opened with: “Yeah, without a multi-spouse marriage system based on income, the birthrate just isn’t going to stop falling lol.” He went on to share his personal take: “If you make 20 million yen a year, let them have two wives or two husbands — tax revenue would go up, the number of kids would go up, and I think affairs and cheating would go down too lol.”
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Robots don't consume or pay taxes though.
Only people who actually want one can take it in and raise it.
Sounds like something a middle schooler would say.
Sounds like a 7th grader who just "awakened" to something. People call this chuunibyou ("2nd-year-of-middle-school syndrome," i.e. edgy teen delusions of grandeur), but this type basically vanishes by 8th grade.
If the women involved are fine with it, maybe it's not so bad.
Have you already forgotten the Employment Ice Age, back when there was a whole big generation of kids and nowhere for them to go?
What matters is how many jobs actually pay new grads enough to save — that's everything.
And you'd have twice as many kids.
Wives wouldn't live any better than if they were the sole spouse either, so only lower-ranked women would agree to a multi-wife setup.
And the real problem is divorce — even if you don't divorce, if one of the other wives does, your assets still take a hit.
And the 17th-century boom, over roughly a 100-year span, was driven by new farmland development — polygamy barely factored in. Even back then, only rich people practiced it.
The real secret to boosting population is simple: force everyone into arranged marriages — ugly guys, unattractive women, low earners, all of it. That's it.
Even if you force people into marriage like that, they probably still won't have kids.
Why is everyone only thinking about how to dodge paying up?
He's clearly not thinking this through — it's just an off-the-cuff idea.
For household income, husband at 7 million and wife at 3 million is just a normal family. The media loves calling couples "power couples," but I'd say husband at 12 million and wife at 7 million is more like it.
Though only producing smart people is a problem too — the sharper and more educated someone is, the more they avoid "3K" jobs (dirty, dangerous, demanding work).
Polygamy isn't just about male desire — there's also a side to it where the haves lift the have-nots out of poverty.
Exactly. The pace of childbirth wouldn't change at all — all you'd get is the downside of not knowing if the kid is even yours. Most men would say "no way" to raising a kid that isn't their own blood. Polyandry only really works in places like a few pockets of China or Southeast Asia, where men don't need to work in the first place.
Background and Points of Debate
Article 732 of Japan’s Civil Code bans bigamy, so introducing a “multi-spouse marriage system” would require a fundamental overhaul of the legal framework. GaaSyy’s comment was offered as a personal opinion without addressing this legal reality, and many in the thread were quick to question how realistic it actually is. As for birthrate countermeasures, the relationship between income and number of children isn’t so simple — higher-income households aren’t necessarily more likely to have kids, and as some pointed out, even households earning in the 10-million-yen range still find child-rearing a financial strain. There’s also the view that Japan’s postwar population boom was driven mainly by the spread of arranged marriage (omiai), not polygamy, suggesting that policies aimed at boosting the marriage rate itself might be more effective than changing the shape of the marriage system. GaaSyy is a former House of Councillors member who was formally expelled from the chamber, and some see the point of remarks like these as less about their truth or feasibility and more about grabbing attention.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5channel (Geisokuho+) thread “‘Without Income-Based Multi-Spouse Marriage, the Birthrate Won’t Stop Falling’ — GaaSyy’s Opinion Post Sparks Reaction.”
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