roles of geographical peripherality and industrial transformation in regional shrinkage. Sachie Mizohata’s and Richard Irving’s research focuses on peripherality in, respectively, the K Region of Kyoto and Shiga Prefectures and in the Kanbayashi River valley, showing the limitations of topographical isolation. Philip Seaton and Naofumi Nakamura then relate the stories of two regional cities that have undergone massive economic contraction due to the collapse of their industrial bases—namely, the former coal-mining town of Y
bari City in Hokkaido and the iron and steel centre of Kamaishi City in Iwate Prefecture.
Part II investigates how communities in Japan have responded to their circumstances as shrinking regions. Out of our research emerge four response themes: redeveloping, repopulating, recovering, and reinventing the region; these last two are based on notions of rediscovery. Chapters 6 and 7 examine the notion of revitalising the regions by attempting to regrow their economies and populations. In the former, Thomas Feldhoff, Sachie Mizohata, and Philip Seaton argue against the prevailing governmental response in the postwar era whereby governments and authorities at all levels attempted to regrow regional economies through infrastructure developments of increasingly questionable public utility and value. As a result, a complex and—we would argue, addictive—relationship of codependency among national, regional, and local actors has been developed around Japan’s construction industry and become embedded in the fabric of the postwar national and regional political economies. Whereas chapter 6 deals with the past, in chapter 7 Yoko Sellek and Peter Matanle look to the future with an analysis of the potential for repopulating Japan’s regions through immigration from overseas, a topic that is frequently debated in academic and policy circles. The chapter critiques the argument for replacement migration from both empirical and theoretical perspectives and ends with a pragmatic justification for acknowledging, accepting—even embracing—shrinkage as a fact of regional life in Japan. By presenting three cases at differing levels of geographical scale, chapter 8 takes a multilevel approach to the search for viable alternatives to redevelopment and repopulation by