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leaders’ overall understanding of how and where each author’s contribution fits into the overall schema. Though the bulk of each author’s work may at times have been preserved more or less in one piece, constituting a notable section within a broader thematic chapter or part of the book, other segments are likely to be found in various places throughout the book and have been combined to provide additional detail and clarity. In addition, the project leaders have written both the introductions and conclusions to each chapter, this preface, and the volume’s conclusion and epilogue; they have smoothed out the text and have rewritten some parts of it, and have inserted data and analysis into the body of each chapter to enhance theoretical continuity and empirical breadth across the whole volume. We therefore do not indicate the author of each and every contribution where it occurs; instead, we name the main contributors to each chapter in alphabetical order in a footnote at the base of the chapter’s first page and provide an overall description of the book and our coauthors’ contributions towards the end of this prologue. Rather than a conventional edited volume with discrete chapters by different authors, then, this book is a properly coauthored monograph, written by an unusually long list of authors that we have named The Shrinking Regions Research Group. Moreover, we believe that bringing together such a geographically diverse set of data and case studies at the macro, mezzo, and micro scales of analysis gives our volume a resonance and a representativeness that would be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve within the resource confines of a single-authored project. It is our hope that we have woven together a theoretically, methodologically, and empirically rich and textured narrative exploring the contemporary reality of Japan’s shrinking regions.
This book is, first, an examination and evaluation of the contemporary demographic and socioeconomic decline of Japan’s non-metropolitan rural regions and, second, an analysis of the responses to shrinkage that have been developed thus far at the national, regional, community, and individual levels. We present this research with a view to laying down a set of evidence-based markers that might serve to inform future research and action. To the degree that a solution can be brought to the fore in