Waka Ikeda is a Tokyo-based freelance journalist covering society, culture and the movie industry.
In the late 1980s, Bon Jovi released "Bad Medicine," a song about a toxic relationship. Nearly four decades on, Japan faces its own "bad medicine" epidemic: government-prescribed dating apps, speed-dating events and marriage seminars aimed at curing a national romance crisis. But like the song's doomed love affair, these taxpayer-funded remedies may be making things worse -- offering solutions to a generation too paralyzed by self-doubt to embrace them.
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