Description
In 2005, for the first time in its modern peacetime history, Japan’s population began to shrink. Based on current trends, the government projects that the nation will continue to decline in size at an average rate of half a million people per year for at least the next forty years. The country is also getting older, and aging is expected to reduce the size of the labor force such that the ratio of dependants to active workers is expected to approach 1:1 by around 2030. These two interdependent processes will deliver great changes to Japan in the coming decades.
Most rural areas have been shrinking since as far back as the early 1950s. The impacts have already been huge, and for some communities, catastrophic. Entire villages have disappeared, or even been “sold.” Thousands of municipalities have been judged “non-viable” and merged. Thousands more private and public sector enterprises have collapsed and left colossal debts, while hundreds of thousands of older people have been left to live out miserable and solitary lives in neighbourless communities, as relatives have move away and nearby families have abandoned their homes. Japan’s rural shrinkage has to a large extent been the unseen corollary of Japan’s extraordinarily dynamic urban expansion and, indeed, Japan’s postwar economic miracle can be said to have been achieved at the expense of rural retreat.
In the twenty-first century, a historic turnaround in global demographic trends will be witnessed. The developed world is not reproducing at a rate that will enable population expansion over the longer term. Europe and East Asia are especially vulnerable to demographic shrinkage within the coming decades. Germany is already shrinking, as is Russia. South Korea will begin to shrink soon and, importantly, so will China from around 2035. The UN projects that the world’s population will begin to shrink by 2050. Overall, this is a positive development, but it brings with it worldwide changes that will impact ways of living and working.
What is new, and potentially disastrous for many communities around the world, is the negative-sum game that national depopulation brings to the fore. In these circumstances and in the absence of large-scale immigration, one region’s growth will require another’s shrinkage. In Japan, given that Tokyo is continuing to expand, it is therefore inevitable that the majority of the country’s towns and cities, and even some metropolitan areas, will decline in size. Nevertheless, it is by no means certain that depopulation will deliver predominantly negative outcomes. Properly managed, it may result in improvements to citizens’ lives as living space expands and the built environment is reconfigured––and if consumption declines. Whatever the outcomes, how communities succeed within their emerging circumstances might depend on the extent to which they can learn from the past experiences of Japan’s rural regions.
These problems come at a particularly difficult moment, when the world begins to grapple in earnest with the fallout from centuries of accumulated human pressures on the natural environment. Japan, as one of the world’s richest and most technologically advanced societies and as a pioneer in shrinking population economics, will once more be a focus of attention as the world searches for solutions to some of the most pressing issues of our time.
Bringing together detailed research from across the whole Japanese archipelago from macro to micro levels, this book combines the work of 18 international scholars in the first comprehensive study of contemporary regional shrinkage under Japan’s national depopulation. The contributions have been arranged thematically, and interspersed throughout the book are tables, charts, diagrams and photographs that visually augment and describe the processes and impacts of regional shrinkage. In this way the book stitches together a representative variety of detailed and richly textured examinations of shrinkage at the local level, out of which emerges the overall story of Japan’s depopulation and its place within the trajectory of world development.
The book shows that shrinkage has not been a uniform experience for regional communities, as some settlements have expanded and others close by have disintegrated. It also describes the differential processes of shrinkage taking place throughout Japan in the postwar era, as well as their characteristics, impacts and implications. From remote mountain villages to regional industrial centers, the authors analyze the responses that national, regional, local and individual actors have brought to bear on shrinkage, including the important roles that the state and municipal authorities, and the construction and tourism industries have played. Ominously, the authors demonstrate that depopulation is deepening and broadening to include larger and more densely populated settlements as the national population decline becomes more entrenched. The authors conclude by arguing that depopulation and socioeconomic decline may combine to induce individuals and groups to begin to rethink growth and to embrace a new way of life that prioritizes stability and, even, sustainability.
This will be an important source for all social science collections, as well as for researchers, policy makers, and practitioners with interests in regional development, East Asia, and post-industrial change.