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

examining how regional actors are attempting to recover their economies from the ground up. John Knight’s description of residents’ attempts to keep nature from swallowing their mountain village leads to the sobering conclusion that many of these settlements will eventually disappear in the course of Japan’s national depopulation and continued concentration in the capital region. At the city and prefectural levels, Naofumi Nakamura describes some hopeful developments in Kamaishi City as the community attempts to recover some stability after the steep decline in its economy, and Andrew David considers similar developments in Kchi Prefecture. Both of these cases have met with some success, but these are small scale, and in the face of a very difficult external economic environment, they lack the vigour and sustainability required to be regarded as full-fledged recoveries.

In chapters 9 and 10, we examine in detail the regional tourism industry from the perspectives of current practice and theoretical potential. Tourism is emerging as the dominant industry in Japan’s regions as government reforms take hold and the national economy continues its transformation from manufacturing to services and as communities strive to reinvent themselves for a new era of shrinkage and greater independence from the centre. In chapter 9, Donald Wood, Richard Siddle, and Ken Ohori present examples of regional reinvention through the development of cultural tourism, ecotourism, and green tourism in Akita’s Oga peninsula, the peripheral islands of Okinawa Prefecture, and the former steel town of Kamaishi City. In chapter 10, Anthony Rausch and Thomas Jones explore the potential for regional tourism development in the operationalisation of a reinvented and rebranded identity around a region’s cultural heritage and natural endowments. Peter Matanle and Anthony Rausch conclude the volume by first tying all of these themes to a review of the role of population growth and shrinkage in the development of Japan’s postwar political economy and then by linking this review to the lessons that can be learned and applied—in Japan’s urban locales as they encounter shrinkage, as well as across Asia and Europe in the years and decades to come. We conclude the book with the following research and policy recommendations: