Japanese "Breeding Visas" Hoax

About

Japanese "Breeding Visas" Hoax refers to an April Fools' Day article from 2018, which claims that the Japanese government will begin offering "breeding visas" for foreigners to combat the country's declining population and birth rates. A snippet of the article and its remakes have been reposted out-of-context in the following years, with some users falling for the hoax.

Origin

On April 1st, 2018, Japanese culture news website SoraNews24^[1] posted a joke article titled "To combat declining birth rate, Japan to begin offering 'Breeding Visas' to foreigners." The article claimed that to combat the declining birth rate in the country, the Japanese government would begin issuing "breeding visas" to residents of foreign countries. Said visas would require applicants to provide evidence of at least one pregnancy that they helped induce, and the applicants would have to be at least 21 years old, be in good physical and mental health and have scored at least chunin level on the official Naruto Certification Exam.

Spread

On April 1st, 2018, Redditor truesord24 posted a link to the article to the /r/aprilfools^[2] subreddit, where it gained over 210 upvotes in six months. On November 6th, 2018, X^[3] / Twitter user @Vagineer1 posted the earliest found meme based on a snippet of the article (shown below).

On July 8th, 2020, a meme Facebook^[4] page posted a My Time Has Come meme based on the snippet that garnered over 8,700 reactions and over 2,200 shares in four years (shown below, left). The image was widely circulated online in the following months and years. For example, on November 12th, 2020, iFunny^[5] user 2old2meme reposted it, with the repost gaining over 58,500 smiles in four years.

More memes based on the snippet were posted in 2020 and 2021. For example, on January 6th, 2021, Redditor Sharky_238 reposted a meme originally shared in the /r/memes subreddit, gaining over 16,000 upvotes in /r/justneckbeardthings^[6] in roughly three years (shown below, right).

On February 14th, 2023, X^[7] user @Madam_Boonn posted a cropped version of the snippet, with the post (since deleted) going viral on the platform.

The hoax again went viral on social media in June 2024 after the headline was paired with a new picture,^[8] with some users falling for the joke story.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References