| Chapter 1: | Introducing Japan’s Shrinking Regions* |
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can then accumulate an additional loss in terms of reduced capabilities to attract investment in new and economically sustainable sources of employment. The consequent economic contraction leads to a decrease in individual purchasing power for rural residents and consequently a significantly lower potential for endogenous economic sustainability. This leads to decreasing municipal tax revenues and in turn less local investment in public and private infrastructure—which, over the long term, results in declines in the local quality of life and provokes feelings of geographical peripheralisation, social isolation, and exclusion among residents.
Population shrinkage is also visually apparent in the areas where it occurs. Accompanying the decline in economic fortunes is a tendency towards less new construction and renovation of residential and business properties, a trend that leaves the built environment appearing increasingly shabby and run down. Changes in local patterns of land use are an important issue in the character of rural places as well, one that often brings ecological consequences. As a result of the contraction of agricultural activities, there is an increase in the acreage of disused agricultural land and scrub vegetation. With the withdrawal of an agrarian human presence, human control of plant growth is reduced, and within a matter of years a pattern of succession resumes. Within decades, farmland and grassland give way to secondary forest and its fauna. In this way, the decline in the human population of remote areas comes to be associated with an increase in the numbers of insects, birds, and mammals living in proximity to and within sparsely populated human settlements, though possibly not a return to pre–human habitation levels of biodiversity (Jacob et al., 2008). Shrinking therefore implies a process in which development trends usually regarded as negative come to be cumulatively linked together (Heineberg, 2005; BMVBS & BBR, 2006, p. 27).
Consequences of Population Shrinkage
Whether a declining economy leads people to leave or an increasing number of people leaving results in a declining economy, it is clear that as the process advances, there are consequences. Some that have been