Abstract
It is important to examine how residents' self-governance can be grown in a community that is a smaller unit than a formal municipality such as a town, a village and a city, in addition to redesigning relations between the national government and the local governments of the formal municipalities, when decentralization of power is planned for the future. Such a small unit of community is the place where people living there easily share the image of landscape and talk about it with each other. A former village until it was merged into a larger municipality before or soon after the World War II corresponds to such a unit.
Residents' movement has been carried out to establish the district promotion council and grow self-governance in such a unit in Chizu, Tottori prefecture, Japan. This paper reported (1) the process in which the council was established, (2) major activities of the council so far, and (3) results of activities and challenges for the future, in each of the three districts, namely former villages, among a total of six districts in Chizu, based on intensive interview to the residents.
