Shunsuke Kimura - Regional Administration in Japan: Departure From Uniformity

In Japan, the main local administrative affairs are traditionally allotted to prefectures and municipalities, while communal disposal systems, firefighting, and regional development take secondary importance. However, two new changes to the frame of local governments have altered the main frameworks of national and provincial governance. With decentralization reforms taking effect, more local bodies are gaining autonomy and departing from uniformity. This has allowed methods of cooperation between governing bodies to diversify trends which augur a dissolution of uniformity in Japanese local administration. If left alone, it may eventually lead to disparities between principal and peripheral bodies, and thus complicate the administrative systems further. How will these changes affect future community development? This book aims to address the dynamism of concepts of wide-area public service in Japan. It advocates the use of flexible strategies to ensure service standards are best suited to each regional demand. This concept can be called departure from uniformity. This book also examines the advantages and disadvantages of these shifts for the future of Japanese public policy, and suggests various strategies to prevent further complications (e.g., autonomous settlement zones).

Regional Administration in Japan will interest researchers of Japanese public policy and public administration. This book will also engage researchers of Japanese politics and Japanese studies in general.

Shunsuke Kimura is Professor at the Graduate School of Law in Hitotsubashi University, Japan.

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

59 Examining Japans Lost Decades

Edited by Yoichi Funabashi and Barak Kushner

60 Japanese Women in Science and Engineering

History and policy change

Naonori Kodate and Kashiko Kodate

61 Japans Border Issues

Pitfalls and prospects

Akihiro Iwashita

62 Japan, Russia and Territorial Dispute

The northern delusion

James D.J. Brown

63 Fukushima and the Arts in Japan

Negotiating disaster

Edited by Barbara Geilhorn and Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt

64 Social Inequality in Post-Growth Japan

Transformation during economic and demographic stagnation

Edited by David Chiavacci and Carola Hommerich

65 The End of Cool Japan

Ethical, legal, and cultural challenges to Japanese popular culture

Edited by Mark McLelland

66 Regional Administration in Japan

Departure from uniformity

Shunsuke Kimura

In the local administrative system, the structure of local governments is essential. Japan has two types of local governments: ordinary local governments (ordinary governments) and special local governments (special governments). The ordinary governments are prefectures and municipalities. The special governments are unions and similar entities. Unions comprise partial-affairs associations (PAA) and regional unions, which have mostly controlled a variety of regional public services, such as garbage disposal, firefighting, and regional-level development. Regional unions have played an important part in the regional administrative approaches manifest in a variety of forms, such as unions, councils, shared administrative organizations, delegation of duties, and dispatch of personnel.

In Japan, ordinary governments have principal roles in the local administrations, and special governments fulfill supplementary yet crucial functions. However, ordinary governments have recently undergone significant changes. Generally, national laws determine their functions; however, these functions have been enlarged by decentralization reforms. Simultaneously, the number of ordinary governments has markedly decreased because of the major amalgamation movement that occurred between 1999 and 2010, in which the number of municipalities decreased from 3,229 to 1,771. These substantial changes significantly influenced the structure of special governments. Moreover, local administrations have been influenced by numerous social changes and agendas, such as rapidly decreasing populations, low birth rates, and an aging population, which shrinks the proportions of taxpayers, widens regional differences, slows decentralization, and so on. Under these conditions, broad public services have been significantly challenged.

The goal of this book is to review the dynamism of the concepts relevant to Japans regional administrative system in this context. It addresses three basic questions:

Traditionally, the basic concept of the Japanese local administration is to establish the national minimum and improve the regional standards of service in which residents should be provided the same level of public services across regions. However, those ideas are beginning to change.

There are two new thematic trends. First, it is expected that proactive separate transitions will continue changing into an effective cooperative style, and rapid transition to this suitable style is anticipated in local administrations. One of the challenges of the traditional wide-area administrative methods such as PAA is that it is difficult to obtain a speedy consensus among the affiliated local governments. Responding to those issues, the Local Autonomy Law (LAL) introduced a simple process by which an affiliate could secede from an association (PAA or council) for the transition to more suitable types.

Second, a new type of wide-area administrative method was introduced: the autonomous settlement zone (ASZ) system.

The declining birthrate and growing proportion of elderly people, the dramatic depopulation, and the tight state finances began in Japan at the beginning of the 21st century. Under these conditions, the idea that all the municipalities should take on the full set of public service functions fell into difficulty, and the idea changed from raising the level of the total unit to approving the spillover functions of the central city in the region. This idea is based on the todays status of the regional situation, in which the regions central city is responsible for spillover functions by providing some services, such as medical, social welfare, and transportation, to the peripheral areas.