Merging Away

A small item in the newspaper this week noted that several towns in Saga prefecture have begun to discuss the possibility of merging into one administrative unit. These are no ordinary towns, at least as far as my family is concerned: they include the various communities within Kanzaki-gun, including the town of Kanzaki itself. Our family connection to Kanzaki emerges in other essays elsewhere on this site. This week, I have been looking through stories from the past year on the trend toward local mergers and amalgamations in Japan. After a rocky start in government policy circles, this fundamental reorganization of local administration seems to be picking up steam. In this, we are part of a worldwide trend: municipal level governments in most of the wealthier countries have been subject to various pressures for change. We should watch these trends carefully, wherever we may live: municipal government is often neglected, and this neglect can have dire consequences.

First, though, a word about terminology and local organization. All the towns that concern me this week are within ‘Kanzaki-gun’ – an area not to be confused with the town of Kanzaki, which is one among several semi-urban areas within the district. A ‘gun’ is sometimes translated as a ‘county’ in the American sense, but it is often left alone and not translated. This makes good sense. We can think of it as a rural district: a moderately large area, sparsely populated, with a few towns, and clusters of more or less isolated farmhouses. Kanzaki-gun is quite large, and encompasses land uses ranging from mountain forests to plains agriculture. Of the six towns and villages involved in the recent amalgamation discussions, three are plains towns – Kanzaki, Mitagawa, and Chiyoda – and three are in the mountains – Higashi-Sefuri, Sefuri, and Mitsuze. Chiyoda, the farthest south, has a river link to the Ariake Sea; Mitsuze, the farthest north, is near the top of the mountain barrier separating Fukuoka and Saga.

It should be obvious that these are geographically distinct and widely separated communities. Local conditions led to the development of quite different local cultures – but, old as they are, they are not secure; and changes in the local population may lead to a fundamental reorientation for the overall area. These sorts of conditions obtain all over Japan, and in recent years they have led to a national problem in local government: there is a decreasing number of people to govern, and to pay town fees and taxes. In addition, rural districts are home to a dwindling number of young people: their populations mostly consist of the grandparents of people born in the city. All of this is a direct result of the massive shift in population distribution Japan has experienced since the postwar years. In the late 1940s and 1950s, when the Baby Boom swept Japan, rural communities still housed the bulk of the population. This generation of young people stimulated a great deal of development in small and moderately sized country towns and villages, the scars of which are everywhere in Kanzaki and other similar areas. These children proved unwilling – or unable – to remain in their hometowns, and millions of them moved off the land and into the cities. It appears to be a fact of life that once a population gives up the land, it does not go back, except in unhappy and extreme circumstances. True, there are people who now take advantage of rural communities to live a simpler life – often enjoying local and national government subsidies to do so. Their numbers are small, however, and will never be sufficient to buoy up the tax revenues of places like our six Kanzaki-gun municipalities.

The national government has been talking about local-level reorganization for some time, with the amalgamation drive beginning in earnest with the government of Prime Minister Koizumi. In 2001, three cities in Saitama prefecture amalgamated to produce Japan’s tenth largest city. This new ‘Saitama City’ is far from emblematic of the question of rural mergers, but it has been set out as the lead for other communities to follow. Also in 2001, the national government published studies and estimates relating to municipal mergers, noting an aim to cut the number of cities, towns, and villages to about 1,000 from the current 3,228. The relevant ministry claimed that the number of municipalities could be cut to a third or even a fifth of the current level, in order to save up to 5 trillion yen a year in administration expenses. Early this year, the Kyodo news agency conducted a survey of local governments and concluded that a clear majority – more then sixty percent – are considering some kind of merger. Tellingly, this survey found that only six percent of the municipalities surveyed were contemplating mergers in the belief that they would boost the local economy. Kyodo interpreted this to mean that local officials were following the central government's line: resigned to the inevitability of mergers while not mustering much enthusiasm for them.

The rush is on because a special law that grants financial and other perks to merging municipalities will expire in 2005, and most local officials realize that they will lose out in the long run if they resist the government’s plans. These plans include – in theory – a significant devolution of authority from the centre to local administrations, in particular the all-important power to collect and spend taxes. We might well worry that all this devolving – theoretical as it may be – is taking place in a context of disintegrating local identity. The municipal governments to emerge from this round of mergers will, in the main, represent new and untested local areas, often with little connection to the historical geography of their local areas. If the six governments currently talking in Kanzaki-gun do end up merging, the resulting municipality will oversee the affairs of a diffuse community of ageing farmers, foresters, and fishers – all widely separated by both physical and historical circumstance. One wonders if devolution to smaller communities may be a better answer: smaller communities with more autonomy and less administration. There is a long tradition of this kind of local government in Japan: government where local people take on local projects by themselves, with little direction or support from the centre. Perhaps we can imagine a day when village-level communities in merged municipalities are forced to create this sort of structure on their own – if their local government is too distant to understand their needs.

2002/06/08

Date posted: 2003-09-15