Japan's Shrinking Regions in the 21st Century: Contemporary Respo ...

been manifest throughout history in rural and urban locations in every major region of the world, including Japan (Rieniets, 2005). Writing in the 1970s, several scholars focused on regional decline as a key theme in Japan’s social and economic history from the 18th through the 20th century. Yet for various reasons, the interplay between demographic atrophy and growth in Japan over the long term has, until recently, failed to gain the attention it deserves.

One reason for this may be related to the types of scholarship many prefer to write and read. Ward-Perkins (2005, p. 182) noted his puzzlement that ‘the word ‘decline’ should be so contested in historical writing, when ‘rise’ is used all the time, without anyone ever batting an eyelid.’ Perhaps, he continued, the problem is psychological, both in the ‘strongly negative connotations’ of the word decline and in its implicit sense ‘that somebody can and should be blamed for the change.’ Regardless of whether this is true of academic writing in general, the experience of Culter (1999), who was questioned during her research in Ybari in the 1980s as to why she had chosen a topic—managing decline—that ‘did not fit the reality,’ suggests that there has at times been a particular aversion to the narratives of shrinkage which could be explored further.

Yet the general phenomenon of depopulation is comparatively under-researched. Until the closing decades of the 20th century, nearly all scholars and policy makers had assumed that the principal demographic question that the world faced was rapidly increasing populations, particularly in the developing world. Moreover, based on the research of Warren S. Thomson (1929), it had been assumed that development issues—principally declining infant mortality, rising female education and empowerment, and the high cost of raising multiple children to adulthood in modern urban settings—would bring birth and death rates into balance, such that countries’ populations could remain stable for long periods after such a balance had been achieved. This change from a rapidly expanding to a stable population was termed the demographic transition. What had not been predicted, however, was that developed countries would go beyond this state into a second demographic transition, first identified in Europe by Van de Kaa (1987), whereby deaths would begin to exceed births and inward migration