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

inspiration at the very least. Indeed, some consider even neglect to be a form of agency that eventuates in collapse (Diamond, 2005). In his review of the Schwartz and Nichols (2006) volume entitled After Collapse, Yoffee (2006) argued that ultimately ‘regeneration doesn’t just happen; it has to be engineered’ (p. 225). Accordingly, one of the questions that emerges from our research is this: What would constitute a successfully engineered regional or community regeneration in the Japanese context?

Introducing Japan’s Shrinking Regions

In the postwar period, population shrinkage began in Japan’s more remote rural areas just as the so-called baby boom peaked, in about 1950. As early as the 1960s, regional social and economic decline as a consequence of rural depopulation had been recognised on an official basis with regeneration initiatives such as the jiba sangy shink jigy (regional industry promotion projects) and the isson ippin (one village, one product) movement of the 1970s (Knight, 1994). However, although such revitalisation measures have been a constant feature of policy approaches to rural decline and depopulation (other elements aimed at reversing the declining birth rate having been pursued since the 1990s), in aggregate, they have had almost no success reversing either economic decline or demographic shrinkage (Masaki, 2006).

Exacerbating already difficult circumstances, both the global and the Japanese national economies have seen trends positive and negative over this long period, all of which have in general negatively affected Japan’s rural regions. Positive trends have spurred economic growth in metropolitan regions (against which rural economies find it difficult to compete to retain investments in human and social capital), and periods of contraction and stagnation bring about a reduction in financial flow to rural prefectures and municipalities. The decline in the national population, combined with the continued concentration of activity in the capital region, are further accelerating regional depopulation, meaning that it has become inevitable that some communities are now collapsing