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The story
According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications’ population migration statistics, Okayama Prefecture’s net outflow rate for women in their early 20s hit 3.07% last year, while Kagawa Prefecture’s reached 3.71%. That means more than 3% of women in their early 20s left each prefecture within a single year. The original article presents this figure as one factor behind rural population decline. On 5ch, opinions split between those citing structural causes — a lack of appealing jobs and universities locally — and those citing cultural ones, namely a desire to escape the gender-role pressures and conservative atmosphere that persist in rural areas.
Special feature: the decline of young women in Okayama and Kagawa is accelerating.
■ Over 3% of women in their early 20s leave Okayama and Kagawa in a single year
According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, last year Okayama Prefecture’s net outflow rate for women in their early 20s was 3.07%. Kagawa Prefecture’s was 3.71%. That means more than 3% of women in their early 20s left Okayama and Kagawa within a single year.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Okayama already has words like 'hanakamitai' that'll get you punched if you say them carelessly, so banning a few more is no big deal (a local phrase that sounds offensive out of context)
If anything, leaving the turf you grew up in takes more guts — women are the braver ones here, really. Zoom out and rural men are basically shut-ins who don't know the world, big fish acting like the boss of their tiny pond, when in reality they're just hopeless cowards
At the very least, there's no happiness in Tokyo… especially brutal for women I'd think (he uses 'man-san,' a dismissive 5ch slang term for women)
Unless a woman gets into a Tokyo university on the level of Waseda/Keio or better, or heads to Tokyo from Okayama University holding a ticket in — a confirmed offer for a full management track at a major company — she's basically stuck
Unlike the countryside, you can at least scrape by somehow in the city
Even so, it's apparently still better than Okayama.
It's become the kind of place young women feel they have to flee from.
And wherever young women are fleeing from is usually some place pushing outdated gender roles and meddling in everyone's life, completely oblivious to it
Do that and young people will show up on their own
Nobody's aiming for a region or company where you 'retire' at 40 and get rehired part-time.
Treating someone like an old fogey and switching them to a rehire contract while their kids are still in elementary or middle school is just insulting.
Go post a job listing at your company offering 300 million yen paid out by age 40 and see who shows up
If anything, I think it'd be better if women between 40 and 65 could land stable, well-paid jobs
That's not it.
They're leaving right after they graduate from university
There's nothing there but Sunshine City, so why do people always flock to places that crowded?
In exchange, give women who move in a 5 million yen settling-in grant, plus 1 million yen per child born
Legally impossible.
You can't restrict where people live
What is this, defecting from your feudal domain?
Women get literally pointed at and laughed at for speaking Okayama dialect
Okayama Prefecture does have an adult shop called Book Mate
I mean, if you can get out to the city, you should
If you can land a job at a top-tier company, sure, leave — but if not, I think you'd be happier staying in the countryside.
Especially ten years from now
Like the feudal Edo era, set up checkpoints and don't let anyone defect from the domain.
Guess it's back to 'guns in, women out' (an Edo-period checkpoint policy restricting incoming firearms and outgoing women)
Anyone who defects from the domain will be hunted down by order from above — searched out to the last blade of grass and cut down
Everything's concentrated in Tokyo, with only a handful of options in Kansai
The jobs concentrated in Tokyo are mostly liberal-arts-track office jobs, so that's risky — AI could wipe them out within ten years
Though doesn't Okayama just not have any top-tier universities to begin with…?
https://kotobank.jp/image/dictionary/nipponica/media/81306024018325.jpg
Studying, sure, I get that — but making money off sports is such a rare case, why bring that up like it's a normal option?
He means getting into college on an athletic recommendation.
So really, Re: #186 should've said 'can't get into a top university through academics or sports' instead of just 'not good at studying or sports'
If you're at the level of having competed in the Inter-High (the national high school athletic championships), even without an athletic scholarship you can still get into a well-known private university through a designated-school recommendation
Use your sports record to get into 'Mākan' (slang for a certain junior college), and with decent looks and a bit of charm you can land something like a region-limited general track job at a big company (what used to be called the 'office lady' track).
Then marry an elite there, lol.
Though even then, buying a house in today's Tokyo is probably still out of reach
Background and key points of this discussion
It’s worth noting that this “3% net outflow rate” measures the share of women in their early 20s for whom outflow exceeded inflow within that single year — it is not a cumulative population decline figure. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications publishes this kind of “young women leaving” data every year, and the same trend holds not just for Okayama and Kagawa but across rural regions generally, including Tohoku, San’in, and Shikoku. Since Hiroya Masuda’s “regional extinction” theory gained traction, two explanations have run side by side: a structural one, pointing to major companies and competitive universities clustering in Tokyo, and a cultural one, pointing to the pressure of gender-role expectations that persist in rural households. The thread reflected that same split, with some blaming the lack of jobs and universities and others saying people want to escape the conservative atmosphere of rural life. Folk theories like “whether there’s an adult shop or not,” meanwhile, have no empirical basis and were left out of this write-up.
※This article excerpts and summarizes the 5ch (News速報+) thread “How do we stop it? Outflow of young women from the prefecture accelerates — over 3% of women in their early 20s left Okayama and Kagawa in a single year.”
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