2025 Volume 24 Pages 124-137
Modern Japanese society, with its ever-declining population and stagnant economy, can be viewed as a shrinking society in the sense that society is contracting rather than expanding. Kansai, centering on Osaka, which was called the “Manchester of the East” before World War II, is a typical example of a shrinking society with a stagnant economy compared to other regions in Japan. Therefore, this paper first clarifies the characteristics of this society from the perspectives of economic scale and population movement, and shows that Kansai has lost the cultural knowledge that was being produced before the war. Next, we examine the nature of this lost cultural knowledge, focusing on the birth of an autonomous society as the foundation for generating cultural knowledge and the introduction of sociology as knowledge related to that society. We then examine the conditions required for emergence of new cultural knowledge in the shrinking society of Kansai. These conditions differ from the expanding society in which a centrifugal force is at work, which sought new knowledge outside of Kansai. Finally, we show that the extent to which a centripetal force is at work is important, since there is a potential place for generating new cultural knowledge based on already accumulated knowledge and products.
