Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosyste ...

Context is, of course, shaped by overt activities, such as information and policies produced by government agencies, such as METI, which publishes a wide array of reports and statistical data on the state of the Japanese economy including annual white papers on the conditions and growth of small and medium enterprises that are accessed and used by local politicians, bureaucrats, and business leaders in places like Niigata or Tōhoku. And, of course, governmental agencies play a significant role in defining how enterprises are defined and how entrepreneurial activity is encouraged and supported. From the perspective of the Japanese government, small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs) are defined in the service and retail industries as having a stated capital of 50 million yen or less and 100-or-fewer employees (service) or 50-or-fewer employees (retail). METI refers to very small businesses as micro-businesses, and this is the type of business on which I will focus throughout the book, although the pharmacy and healthcare corporation I will discuss in chapter 4 is currently growing beyond the definition of a micro-business. A small enterprise is defined as a business operator whose number of regular employees is typically 20 or fewer (5 or fewer in the case of a business operator whose business is situated in the retail or service industries). METI refers to small enterprises as micro-businesses in order to articulate that not only companies but also sole proprietorships are included in its discussion of small/medium business trends.⁴⁴ 

Between 2012 and 2014, there was a national decrease of about 91,000 in micro-businesses, which was largely due to a decrease in sole proprietorships. During the same period, there were approximately 285,000 business startups and 457,000 business closures. The numbers of businesses in retail trade, manufacturing, and construction have decreased significantly while during the same period there has been an increase in the medical, healthcare, and welfare sector, as well as the education/learning support sector.⁴⁵ An important reason for the decrease in micro-businesses is related to the broader problem of population-aging facing Japan. The aging of self-employed business owners has accelerated, with self-employed business owners in their 70s representing the largest