Japan’s Shrinking Regions in the 21st Century: Contemporary Responses to Depopulation and Socioeconomic Decline

Abstract

When The Economist crunched the numbers and released its list of most livable cities on the planet for 2012, Osaka and Tokyo ranked among the top 10—a distinction only Japan could claim that year. Data drawn from 30 indexes, including safety, health care, educational resources, infrastructure, and environment, stood behind the Economist Intelligence Unit’s report. But the appeal of Japan’s ‘global’ cities deserves to be placed in greater context. The pull of these urban hubs is part of a larger story—by no means unique to Japan—in which metropolitan growth in deindustrializing economies belies an equally pervasive and arguably more pernicious demographic and socioeconomic trend—regional shrinkage. For Japan, the repercussions of rural depopulation have been a concern for decades, even as the nation’s total population grew. That growth ended in early 2000. By 2011, Japan’s population was losing some 200,000 people annually. If trends continue, within the next five decades the number of children and working-age adults will decrease by half and the percentage of seniors will double. The effects of these trends have been most pronounced in the Japan’s kosochi, remote communities where seniors already exceed 50% of the population (p. 26), but the phenomenon of shrinkage is far from a peripheral issue.

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