Rural Japan Facing Big Problems As Major Cities Rebound
 

Japan's aging population and new efforts to stanch a long-unquestioned flood of public subsidies are turning swaths of the country's hinterlands into destitute ghost towns. The result is an increasingly sensitive rift between the booming big cities that have ridden Japan's economic revival, centered on gains in high tech industries and manufacturers that can compete globally, and the rural areas left behind.

Big cities like Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka are now leading the comeback, with improved job markets and land prices. But in the small towns good times are a distant memory.

Property values are falling, unemployment is higher, incomes are lower and people are leaving in droves. All but eight of Japan's 47 prefectures saw their populations shrink in 2005.

Yubari (the town that gave it's name to Kill Bill's Japanese schoolgirl assassin, Gogo Yubari), which had 120,000 people in the 1960s, is now forecast to have only 7,000 in 16 years.

Full Article: Yahoo - Low subsidies, aging plague rural Japan

This makes me very sad.

This isn`t something new... I can remember my husband getting postcards from his birth prefecture (begging him to come back) even before we were married. Cities certainly weren`t in a "rebound" then.

People have been leaving the countryside and heading to cities for better opportunities for as long as there have been cities. Many of these countryside towns only have farming or fishing... It`s hard to convince a fresh university graduate in, say, computer science to forget all that and hop on a tractor or a fishing boat.

In my country the idea of living in "the green and peaceful countryside" has of late become increasingly popular, so people are actually starting to move (back) there, supposedly to get away from the stress and pollution of urbanised areas. Perhaps Japan will experience a similar change of attitude towards rural life in the future?

~annelie

Annelie, if you mean England, I don't think that's true. Perhaps it is true of older people, who already have made their fortune, but the reason why talented young people leave Cornwall and Cumbria for big cities is because of poor job opportunities, which is clearly also the case in Japan from the piece of news.

I was actually thinking about Sweden, my home country. ;) In my home town there's been a rather significant rise in job opportunities as a result of people "who have already made their fortune", as you say, moving there from the big cities to settle down. In my previous post I was merely suggesting that the same might happen (if the circumstances are right) in Japan at some point in the future.

Right now I live in a flat in North-West England (though I'll be leaving soon), and it is certainly true that as soon as people graduate from university, they tend to get the heck out of here a.s.a.p. and head down south. Can't say I blame them.

~annelie

Yeah.. I agree with you there.. lol