Organizer: Ted Gilman, University of Michigan
Chair: James White, University of North Carolina
Discussants: James White, University of North Carolina; Satoshi Morito, Institute for
Urban and Regional Development, Tokyo
In the United States and Europe, the story of urban decline is fairly well known. Failure to compete in world markets for consumer goods and heavy manufactured items forced the slow and painful contraction of several sectors of American and European industry. National governments have done little to alter this growth pattern, and regional and local governments have met with only limited success. In reactions to these trends, the politics of urban redevelopment has been a thriving subfield in Europe and North America for years, but Japanese cities have seldom been included in comparative studies.
Nonetheless, since the early 1960s, a similar economic restructuring process has affected many Japanese cities as well. Given Japan's remarkable growth in the postwar period, one might not think that economic decline and urban decay would be a problem. But even during this era of high growth, population movement from the hinterland to the cities, and the transformation in the Japanese economy from heavy to high technology industries, has drained much of the younger population from smaller industrial cities. The recent economic recession has accentuated the problem of population drain for some communities.
This panel addresses the politics of urban redevelopment in Japan from the local, regional, and national perspectives. The complexity of the issue touches on some of the more interesting aspects of Japanese political studies, including state society relations, the changing role of the state in guiding economic growth, intergovernmental relations, and the relationship between politicians and career civil servants. Among the more interesting trends highlighted is a decline in national governmental attempts to control development, and a movement toward privatization, at least at the rhetorical level. Japanese ministries are less focused on achieving equal infrastructural endowment across communities than they were in the past, and this has allowed localities to compete more freely with one another. However, this change in ideology has not been matched by a corresponding change in the bureaucratic routines that structure national aid to localities, nor necessarily in the expectations of local officials themselves. The resulting conflict between ideology and practice has created operational problems for many Japanese communities.
Shigeru Imasato, Kyushu University
What is the problem with Japanese inner city areas? Japanese used to consider inner city areas as desirable places to live. But now fewer people live in the middle of the metropolitan area, and many residents-especially families-have moved to the suburbs. Inner city schools are closed down and their districts combined. Fewer children play on the downtown streets. What has caused this situation to occur? The well known rapid increase in the price of land brought by the so called bubble economy is a major cause of the decline seen in urban residential areas. But there are other causes, too. I will explain the reasons for the decline of Japanese inner cities, focusing on the case of Hakata, in Fukuoka Prefecture.
Hakata is one of the largest downtown areas in Fukuoka City (population about 1.3 million). It has a long history of domestic and international trade, and is also noted for its long standing tradition of government by the merchant residents themselves. The famous Hakata Yamagasa festival, held annually for 750 years and always organized by the autonomous citizens' association called Nagare, is but one example of the long self-government tradition. People in Hakata are proud of their festival. However, Hakata is a typical inner city. The population continues to decrease, and as a result Nagare is almost on the verge of extinction.
A citizens' movement was recently established to revitalize the Hakata area. The movement is supported by researchers, local civil servants, business people, and others in the community. These groups have set up a unique local policy studies organization to look for and generate policy ideas aimed at revitalizing Hakata. I will describe the organization and its activities, including the process by which it operates.
The next section of the paper explains the current national policies intended to lure families back to inner city areas. These policies are primarily formulated and offered by the Ministry of Construction (Kensetsu sho) for implementation by local governments. I will explain the content of these policies, and their appeal-or lack thereof-to the residents of Hakata.
Finally, I will comment on traditional local national governmental relations in Japan. National policies have inherent limits at the local level, and these limits are created by certain entrenched aspects of local national relations. I will describe these limits and propose alternative policy ideas. However, these policy ideas will only be feasible if there is a prior change in the character of local national relations.
Sam Steffensen, Copenhagen Business School
This paper deals with public regional policies and actual socio spatial development issues, primarily focusing on how and in what context they find expression at the regional level in contemporary Japan.
To begin, I explain how the recently promulgated Fourth Comprehensive National Development Plan differs from its three predecessors. The first significant difference is that the Fourth Plan is dominated by socio economic privatization ideologies. This is evident in the high degree of private capital involved in the development and redevelopment projects outlined in the plan, a striking departure from past planning efforts that were dominated by public investment schemes. Second, this national development plan demonstrates a major ideological shift regarding the relationship between large city districts (daitoshi ken) and provincial districts (chiho ken). While past plans predicted a gradual functional decentralization throughout the various regions, this plan downplays that idea. This plan does not express the hope that all regions will develop functional political or economic importance, that regional equality will somehow be achieved. Instead, it implies that Japanese regional development planning is predicated on the fact that Japanese everyday life is, and will continue to be, extremely urbanized; it seems resigned to the fact that Tokyo and other large cities will continue to be the center, and the periphery will continue to be less developed and more peripheral. Cities are the setting for daily social interaction, the consumer market, employment opportunities, and intellectual and cultural stimulation. And, since the economic boom of the mid 1980s, the pursuit of a functional network of regional cities within a hierarchically structured national framework has intensified significantly. At the same time, typical "problem areas" such as declining single-industry cities and rural communities are forced into deliberately individualized development strategies predicated on an interactive relationship with various levels of dynamic regional core cities and international exchange. The national ideology regarding regional development is thus pulled in two contradictory directions.
Based on the above observations, the paper presents a detailed study of the socio-economic development strategies of two such "problem areas," one in Hokkaido and the other in Kyushu. Their increasingly explicit trend toward place-making (machi-zukuri) efforts are presented, compared, and critically discussed, with special attention given to the steadily growing functional role of their major regional core cities, at the expense of smaller communities. The consequences of structural disparities and functional interchange are highlighted to show that regional growth centers absorb population and economic activities from their own periphery. At the same time, localities within the region are forced into the contradictory tasks of looking out for new trends and opportunities that further distinguish their place-based qualities by exploiting public assistance schemes, tying into functional networks with urban centers, and even creating their own international relations. Pressed further by the recent economic recession, economically declining areas are forced to intensify their place-selling and resource mobilization activities, while the formal national and local efforts aimed at reviving these areas by attracting viable industrial activities are found to be increasingly intractable, with dubious prospects.
Ted Gilman, University of Michigan
Japan is renowned for its rapid economic development in the twentieth century. And the state's role in the promotion and guidance of that growth has received much attention. Part of that guidance has included the gradual elimination of so-called "sunset industries" that can no longer compete in the global economy. For cities in which sunset industries are located, the economic growth of Japan has not been miraculous at all. Instead, they have struggled to maintain local jobs and stem population decline.
How do localities cope with the decline of the primary local employer? This paper describes the efforts of once such city, Omuta, in Fukuoka Prefecture, to stimulate the local economy after the demise of the Mitsui Miike coal mine that supported the city for so long. Local revitalization efforts started late, largely because national subsidies to those working in the coal industry were disbursed for so many years. There was little incentive for the community to seek out new sources of economic support.
Even when redevelopment efforts finally started, most local plans focused on extracting continued subsidies from the national government. Though from a distance this may seem like a simple exercise in pork barrel politics, politicians (other than the mayor) played almost no role in the extraction process. Instead, it was largely a technocratic exercise, where knowledge of the subsidy distribution system was more important than political clout. The institutional structure that limits local fiscal autonomy also seems to stifle policy innovation and creativity. Rather than trying to develop a plan that addressed the specific issues and problems of the individual locality, local officials instead based their strategy and policy decisions on policy "menus" offered by national agencies. Finally, a lack of local consensus on what to do-and how to do it-prevented some beneficial projects from reaching completion. Failure in the local nemawashi process led to a generally failed effort at urban revitalization.
The Omuta case may be more typical of urban revitalization efforts than the success stories highlighted in some Japanese and Western accounts. It demonstrates the continued significance of traditional generalization about local government in Japan: lack of fiscal autonomy, bureaucratic predominance, and dependence on the center. "Supply side" revitalization, at least in this instance, has led to half hearted and largely ineffectual policy.
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