Japan's Regional Inequality in Hard Times

Abstract

The widening economic gap between Japan's major urban centers and its rural regions has been regarded as one of the country's most serious political and social concerns since the early 2000s. This article examines the politics of regional inequality in Japan over the past decade, focusing on the driving force of the growing divide between the urban and rural economies and the strategies of political parties to redress the problem. In this article, I argue that the Koizumi cabinet's fiscal decentralization and neoliberal economic reform contributed to the rapid rise of regional inequality. While the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan attempted to respond to this problem in the post-Koizumi period, the urban-based Democratic Party of Japan strategically made people's growing concern over regional economic disparity a key part of its electoral agenda in order to court the rural vote.

Life beyond growth? Rural depopulation becoming the attraction in Nagoro, Japan’s scarecrow village

“…In Japan, communities that fit the concept of peripheralisation-where the majority of the population are over 65 years old, and the community is no longer functioning as a social group-are called genkai shuraku or a Marginal Community; a term coined by sociologist Akira Ono in 1991 (Endo 2013;Ono, 2005). This widening economic gap between major urban centres and rural regions has been one of Japan's most serious political and social concerns since the early 2000s (Song, 2015).…”

Populism and the print media: the case of Japan

“…The large proportion of the elderly does not explain this: the poverty rate of citizens of working age and below (65 and under) demonstrates that Japan is no outlier (OECD, 2020a). Regional inequality, too, is marked (Toyoda, 2013;Song, 2015). Moreover, wages are stagnant, leaving Japanese workers earning below the OECD average (OECD, 2020a(OECD, , 2020b.…”