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- 1. That Japan’s national, prefectural, and municipal authorities engage local commercial, nongovernmental, and nonprofit organisations and citizens’ groups more fully in the area planning process so that residents may take greater ownership of and make greater commitments to the decisions that affect their communities and places.
- 2. That prefectural and municipal authorities build professional capacity in place branding and management in order to assist in the successful utilisation and management of local cultural and natural assets for the establishment of regional economic stability and environmental sustainability.
- 3. That an international centre be established for researching and developing effective strategies for dealing with the problems in shrinking regions worldwide and for sharing in the advantages that regional shrinkage may bring to light.
- 4. That more research be conducted into discovering the potential positive outcomes of shrinkage, including establishing the existence of possible relationships between depopulation and reducing human pressures on the natural environment.
Overall, Japan’s regions are shrinking and under present trends and calculations will continue to do so through the coming decades. Recessions and recoveries will come and go, and what happens in Japan’s regions will, of course, continue to be linked to wider developments in the national and international economies. How regional communities respond to their local circumstances and external contexts will to some extent depend, we argue, on how those communities understand the relationship between local, regional, and national depopulation. Acknowledging the inevitabilities that some villages will disappear and that local populations will age and decline in size and vitality will play a part in reaching pragmatic resolutions to the questions, issues, and problems that regional shrinkage and national depopulation reveal. If communities can embrace shrinkage as an opportunity to develop a new way of life that emphasizes economic stability and environmental sustainability and that replaces currently prevailing notions of permanent expansion and