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

Evans’s research looks at regional depopulation and decline in Germany and continental Europe. Andrew David, Peter Matanle, and Sachie Mizohata then go on to provide some important definitional and contextual background for the investigation of shrinkage in Japan. Chapter 1 sets the scene for an overview of the European case, which comes in chapter 2. Neil Evans leads this off with continental-scale empirical data on European regional depopulation and its consequences, and then Thomas Feldhoff and Philomena de Lima present evidence from Germany and Scotland. In these two cases we ask readers to consider two contrasting options for resolving the crisis engulfing Japan’s regions: either a continuation of a growth-first approach, which would almost certainly require the Japanese government to resort to repopulating regional communities by large-scale immigration from overseas; or the groping towards a solution that acknowledges depopulation as a fact and even embraces the opportunities that may derive therefrom.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 examine in more detail the characteristics, impacts, and implications of shrinkage for Japan’s regional communities. Sachie Mizohata begins chapter 3 by describing the policy context for Japan’s shrinking regions, or kaso areas, and Peter Matanle follows this with a presentation of demographic data at the national, prefectural, and local levels and extrapolates these data using government projections. The chapter then begins the task of examining the implications of shrinkage in Japan’s regions with Andrew David’s analysis of economic trends in Kchi Prefecture, one of Japan’s most peripheral areas. In chapter 4, Christopher Hood and John Knight deepen this analysis by presenting contrasting perspectives on the recursive causes and effects of depopulation. Hood looks at the role of regional infrastructural development in the form of Japan’s Shinkansen super-express train service, and Knight examines the deterioration of the living environment in a shrinking mountain village in Wakayama Prefecture. Chapter 4 then concludes with some qualitative research by Richard Siddle on settlement patterns in the outer islands of Okinawa, an unusual prefecture in that its population is forecast to continue to grow in the period 2010–2030. Chapter 5 focuses on the