2023 Volume 69 Issue 1 Pages 1-22
After peaking at 128 million in 2008, Japan's population was soon forecasted to decrease rapidly. At the end of 2014, its national government launched two projects: The “Japan's Long-term Population Vision” and the “Comprehensive Strategy for Overcoming Population Decline and Revitalizing Local Economies.” Both of these addressed the country's massive population decline，its deteriorating local communities，and its overconcentration of population in the Greater Tokyo Region. The national government concurrently requested every prefectural, city, town, and village government to formulate visions and strategies at each administrative level. All the governments tackled these tasks with their full efforts. In this paper, which focuses on the population visions created by all 47 Japanese prefectures, we analyzed their basic attitudes toward vison formulation, their targets for fertility rates and social mobility balances between in-migrants and out-migrants, and their population forecasts for 2040. We also discussed their planning process that formulated their visions as well as the probability of attaining them.
There are currently large differences in the present situations of the local populations and their economies among Japan's prefectures based on regional structures and metropolitan/non-metropolitan zones. Consequently, some prefectural governments were strongly motivated to provide proactive visions, and others (especially Tokyo) had reactive or inactive attitudes. When setting targets for fertility rates and social mobility balances，since most prefectures followed the national government's lead, many prefectural governments adopted targeted fertility rates of 1.8 in 2030 and 2.07 in 2040 as well as a targeted social mobility equilibrium in 2020 or 2040. The population goals planned by each government for 2040 were 10 percent larger than their populations estimated by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (NIPSSR), based on the present conditions of the prefectures. Such prefectural targets were based on much more optimistic postulations than those of the NIPSSR. Therefore, the possible achievements of these prefectural population visions are undoubtedly limited. In addition, the prefectures with larger percentages of young women are less likely to adopt proactive countermeasures against lower fertility rates. From the viewpoint of the entire country, Japan's national and prefectural population visions might be rather ineffective for increasing the national birth rate.
We analyzed the discussion in several prefectural assemblies with distinctive population visions. The over-planned populations of almost every prefecture were determined by the optimistic interpretations of the results of various questionnaires of the residents and their policies to maintain minimum-sized population for their own sustainability. They also were fueled partly by individual governor's election manifestos. Finally, we confirmed the importance of prefectural projects in areas larger than cities, towns, and villages as well as the strong political will of prefectural governors to supervise the governments of cities, towns, and villages.
