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and intervening periods of stagnation, such that what was once described as the ‘lost decade’ of the 1990s (see, for example, Hayashi and Prescott, 2002) might now even be described as two lost decades—and counting. Moreover, the Japanese people are now becoming increasingly concerned about the appearance of a kakusa shakai, or a society of gaps, in which one gap is the widening gulf between the country’s metropolitan and rural regions. Under these circumstances, it is no longer possible to subordinate regional shrinkage to the more visible story of urban and national success. Instead (and beyond performing the important task of describing and analysing depopulation and socioeconomic decline in Japan’s regions on its own terms), might the examples of what we call Japan’s shrinking regions be deployed to assist in evaluating, and even predicting, possible trajectories of experience for regional towns, cities, and some metropolitan urban districts as their populations also begin to shrink? The research presented here is a contribution first, to the growing academic conversation on shrinking communities worldwide; second, to recalibrating the terms of academic and public discourse surrounding the narrative of Japan’s postwar development; and third, to developing effective evidence-based policy orientations for shrinking regional communities and urban districts in Japan and beyond in the years to come.
Any research team faced with the challenge of pulling together disparate themes and approaches into one coherent narrative will be faced with a number of tasks and dilemmas. In many cases, this will entail working out thematic groupings, ordering and sequencing papers, prefacing the various works with an introduction and weaving them together in a conclusion. What we have done here is different and is rather more ambitious in its scope.
Based on a workshop convened at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom in July 2008, we took the contributors’ papers, along with some that originated later, and dissected them into their thematic and empirical subsections. We then reassembled and redrafted these into sections, from which emerged the story that we wish to relate. Once complete, we sent the manuscript to the publisher for review; the authors were then asked for revisions based on this review and on the project