List of Disappearing Cities

“Three out of ten cities and towns are going to disappear in the future.” That was the conclusion of a private institute on Thursday. That was because young women are going to escape from regional communities. The national government is not taking appropriate measures to let them stay, because politics and bureaucracy are not working properly. For some reasons, this nation looks like going toward elimination.

A working group on population decline in Japan Policy Forum, a research organization by consultants and scholars, released an estimation report on structure of population in future Japan. It predicted a half of eighteen hundred cities, towns, villages and autonomous districts in major cities will lose women in the age between twenty and thirty nine by fifty percent in next thirty years. The Forum called those autonomous entities “possibly disappearing cities.” About thirty percent of all will reduce their population as less as ten thousand or fewer in 2040, being warned as likely to disappear.

Main reason of people going out is inconvenience of rural community. In local cities, residents are suffering from fewer hospitals and nurseries, long distance to shopping centers and public services, or less communication between the people. Industrial recession worsened the situation. A number of local cities have been failing in structural change of industry.

Although the phenomena cannot be attributed to one administration, politics has been applying inappropriate policies to local communities all the time. Namely, Liberal Democratic Party, now led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, has been pouring resources one-sidedly on infrastructure building constructors, which are basic political supporters of the party. Abe administration is encouraging this wrong tendency of distribution by reinforcing military instead of social security. Bureaucrats do nothing until political leadership delivers order. Living in Tokyo, they do not think this problem as something related to their own lives.

In big cities, fast expansion of old agers produces various problems. The government has estimated that the seventy-five years old and elder increases by seven million by 2040, while overall population in Japan would reduce by twenty-one million. The increase will be concentrated in three big city areas of Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya. Hospitals, social care facilities and services will be fatally in short.

It is urgent for the government to layout a program how to defend big cities from population expansion, and distribute public services and industries to local cities. More effective policy on social security is definitely needed. This problem needs to be recognized as survival of a nation.