we do here is recount how demographic shrinkage is playing out across Japan’s regions and how the people living in these areas are responding to the problems they are encountering. Moreover, neither is this book another study that seeks to describe Japan in a totalising and reductionist manner for the ease of outsiders’ comprehension of things Japanese. This is not a book that carries a comprehensive treatment of the general phenomenon of either shrinkage or revitalisation. We firmly contend that such objectives cannot be realised, and therefore they should not be attempted. The nature of regional and place studies is presently being reconsidered by scholars as they encounter the distinctiveness that characterizes all regions and places and all case studies; so it is for our efforts in the study of regional Japan. We are focusing on a single issue, but one with diverse factors in its origin and compound factors in its process, and investigating it in a set of regions within the (it needs to be said) rather artfully and artificially constructed country that is Japan. What we offer is a heterogeneous collection of portraits and landscapes, of people and places experiencing shrinkage and proposing responses. This volume is a collection that describes a phenomenon that is itself unfolding against the portrait of a country that is being painted and repainted even as we vainly try to capture the moment of our research.
Nevertheless, Japan presents an instructive case of a phenomenon experienced elsewhere but unlikely to be replicated exactly anywhere else. As countries and regions develop, and are themselves affected by the development of other countries and regions, change inevitably occurs. As discussed in this study, many of Europe’s regions are experiencing their own cycles of depopulation, and they are developing their own responses. Does Japan mirror this? Can we therefore argue that there is a degree of path dependency to the phenomena we are researching? Given that Japan’s situation in many ways parallels the social and economic arcs that have been experienced in Europe, are there precedents for what regional Japan is experiencing today? Significantly, if there are path-dependent characteristics in the relationship between economic development and population change, then what of the lessons from Europe and Japan for China, whose own population is projected