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

and that settlements are being abandoned (see BBC Radio 4, 2007). As these factors accumulate and unfold, processes that previously had affected only isolated and remote hamlets and villages are now affecting a broader swathe of regional towns and cities (Flüchter, 2008; Matanle and Sato, 2010; Project Office Philipp Oswalt, 2008). Some have even argued that Japanese society will have to adjust to long-term economic contraction and that depopulation and its outcomes will be replicated even in the poorer inner wards of Tokyo itself (Matsutani, 2006; Nihon Keizai Shimbunsha, 2007, pp. 9–20).

Japan’s shrinking regions at once both conform to and confound easy generalisation. In addition to the dynamics of rural depopulation, the last 20 years has seen increased international agricultural competition, rapid technological change, the collapse in the early 1990s of Japan’s financial bubble, and changing Japanese business models, each of which has contributed to the long-term decline in Japan’s regions. This decline has been accompanied by both declining fertility and continuing out-migration of predominantly younger people, and the average age of remaining residents has steadily increased. The ultimate consequences are a steady decline in the size of communities, a lower quality of life for those that remain, and their eventual loss of independence through merger with larger neighbouring settlements, or even their collapse and disappearance.

Kasochi, as defined under the 2000 Special Law Promoting Independence in Depopulated Areas (kaso chiiki jiritsu sokushin tokubetsu sochih), which remained in effect until 2009, are depopulated rural areas that ‘have experienced a significant population loss, whereby the area has experienced declines in its vitality and is in a lower level in terms of production functioning and infrastructures related to daily living, compared to other areas’ (Kaso Taisaku Kenky Kai, 2004, p. 3). In April 2010 the law was revised once more for a period of six years and renamed the Revised Special Law Promoting Independence/Autonomy in Depopulated Areas(kaisei kaso chiiki jiritsu sokushin tokubetsu sochih). The term genkai shraku, coined by rural sociologist Akira Ohno, refers to the worst affected kaso communities, those which have