The aim of this paper is to consider regeneration of Japanese economy, especially in agriculture. The first question to be discussed is the concept of agriculture. Over the last decades agricultural geographers have considered agriculture as a regional issue. A large number of studies have focused on the sustainability of some rural settlements, the development of some production areas and the transformations of some agricultural regions. However these researches often fail to grasp agriculture as food supplier. I would like to point out that today in every market of Japan, a huge variety of fruits and vegetables arrive from other prefectures. In the grain markets almost all the wheat and beans arrive from other nations. Under such conditions, it would be unture to consider Japanese agriculture as a regional or local issue. It requires national scale or international scale framework. Today our food supply system has covered all over Japan and extended through the world. To discuss economic regeneration of Japan, the acceptance of such frameworks may be helpful. In this respect food system approach has important implications. As mentioned above, the author has adopted a food system approach and considers agriculture as food supplier. Let us now attempt to extend the observation into the possibility of economic regeneration. The present economic situation of Japanese agriculture can be schematized as in Figure VII. Figure VII consists of three triangles. Each triangle indicates the structure of Japanese food system; the producing center (first triangle); agricultural products (second one); and consuming city (the last one). The first triangle shows that there are a few large producing centers like Kyushu. On the other side, many producing regions are still small. Some of them face a crisis to maintain their activities. The same may be said about the other triangles. Namely, there are a few big markets like Tokyo and Osaka, while on the other hand many markets in local cities still remain small as structures of consuming cities. A relatively small amount of agricultural products gets high prices, on the other side a relatively large amount is being sold at moderate prices. The former are usually high quality goods and the latter are popular-priced goods. Large scale of production promotes efficiency to supply large consumption, therefore large producing centers have survived and have developed. On the other hand small centers have moved relatively backward. Although many agricultural researchers take interest in the growth of large producing centers, it is not a general case, because successful large centers are not so many. The popularity of small centers prevails. We may say that today's stagnation of Japanese agriculture is the main cause for the insufficient development of small centers. Mass production of large centers is useful to satisfy strong demand from big cities indeed, but not so effective for distribution to decentralized small markets in peripheral zones of Japan. In the future small centers can be considered to play an important role. Their productive size and variety suit relatively small demands of local markets. I wish to emphasize that to build up the distribution system between small centers and small markets around Japan would enable the economic revival of agriculture in a lot of backward centers that make the main part of our agricultural region. It seems reasonable to expect the regeneration of Japanese agriculture.

View full abstract

This paper examines the possibility and conditions of the revitalization of hilly and mountainous farming areas in the Tokai region, Japan, based on the analysis of the New Agricultural Fundamental Law. The New Agricultural Fundamental Law was established, as a product of much compromise, without solid national consensus. As a result, the law is often contradictory in nature, and that is most typically represented by the following two aspects. On one hand, it aims to reflect the concerns expressed through national as well as regional movements by groups of people on various agricultural issues. On the other hand, it attempts to force the will of the government as well as that of multinational corporations. What is needed promotion of agriculture and farming regions, led by local residents, at local, national, and international levels by making the best use of the former aspects of the law to overcome the latter aspect. The conditions of such locally driven promotions vary for different regions, however. In the case of the Tokai region, for instance, the conditions are markedly different for Hida distric and Hachiman-cho. The Hida district has been a Sanchi (a region specializing in the production of certain commodities, often with competitive regional brand names) for nearly half a century, whereas Hachiman-cho is a relatively new Sanchi. In my opinion, the recovery of the Japanese economy will be impossible without local-level activities, which are sensitive to these local differences, aiming at revitalizing Japanese agriculture as well as farming regions.

View full abstract

In the last decade, the Japanese SMEs have been restructured to the serious foreign competition and the change of customer's outsourcing strategies with reduction in the number of manufacturers. At this point, the government has vague misgiving about the decay of basic technologies, which have sustained Japanese manufacturing activities, and then is developing the new comprehensive policy toward the locational re-agglomeration of the industrial activities. This report discussed our approaches to the current aspects of the industrial agglomeration system in Japan, especially focusing the machinery industries, through a brief review of recent studies. Study on spatial agglomeration dynamics of industrial activities is the fundamental theme for economic geography. This kind of geographical analysis needs not only the dynamic theory on locational agglomeration and dispersal based on industrial organization, but also deeper material insights into production processes. Therefore, to focus the current aspect of locational agglomeration of the machinery industry, we should adapt both historical moments such as the microelectronics revolution and spatial moments such as the distance of transactional linkages and the expanse of industrial agglomeration to our analysis. From these viewpoints, through the ME revolution era and the globalization era, the agglomeration system of the Japanese machinery industry has experienced clearly the locational dispersal of basic industries and the spatial expansion of linkages. Now, the system seems to be forming the interregional agglomeration network that the government policy encourages. In the future, the arrangement of local milieu and the establishment of social consensus about the need for basic manufacturing technology will be increasingly indispensable for sustainable development of the SMEs' spatial agglomeration in Japan.

View full abstract

In this article, I consider how innovations in transportation and telecommunications have influenced urban structures and urban systems. First, in an intraurban scale, I should examine the trade-off between 'commuting costs' to firms and 'transaction costs' among inter-firms. According to Fujita and Ogawa (1982), in premodern cities, residences were located near their workplaces because commuting costs were very expensive. On the other hand, in contemporary cities, residences and workplaces have been spatially separeted because transport systems for commuting have been well developed. As a result, single central business district (CBD) has been formed because interfirm transaction costs are relatively expensive. If commuting costs become more expensive than transaction costs, CBDs are to be dispersed into peripheries of an urban area. Those CBDs are called 'edge cities'. Second, in an interurban scale (that is, in an urban system), the subsitutional relationship between telecommunications and transportation is important. Because of decreasing telecommunication costs, offices tend to concentrate in metropolitan areas. If a large metropolitan area (for example, Tokyo in Japan) has enough benefit of agglomeration, i.e., urbanization economies, to keep its size, the tendency of concentration in the monopolarized city will be reinforced. The distinction between a metropolitan area and an urban system has become negligible with respect to their sizes. The difference would be even smaller as telecommunications facilitate information circulation. In some cases, this phenomenon means that the whole country reduces to a single nationwide city. Some may fear to lose regional identities of their society and culture under the single nationwide city. I would argue, however, that it will be possible to keep regional identities as district identities 'inside the multi-polarized nation-wide city'.

View full abstract

It is impossible to attain the goal of national growth without the development of the regions that compose the state. Public investment, especially equipment of infrastructure, is known to promote those regional developments. This paper attempts to analyze the Marcos, Aquino, and Ramos administrations with respect to their public investment plans and distribution among each administrative region. Results show an estrangement between plans and reality in achieving the stated goal of rectifying regional disparity. The budget was distributed selectively to the regions where economic efficiency seems to be high. The local government code 1991 which was enacted under the Aquino regime made an attempt to rectify the unbalance between Manila and the rest of the country through the devolution of revenue sources and the power of decision making. Nevertheless, it caused the new problem of unbalance between large local cities and rural areas due to the government's adoption of the growth pole strategy. Foreign capital is also an important factor for economic growth which can cause regional unbalance through selective tax privileges. A national policy that both enlarges the macro economic pie and more evenly distributes slices to the rural population has not yet been at hand. This study made clear the difficulty and problem of pursuing these two goals simulataneously.

View full abstract

In Japan, the national government places greatly stresses on regional income redistribution policies. Consequently, local economies depend heavily on public expenditure in remote rural areas. This study examines changes in the distributional structure of the local allocation tax - a fiscal equalization system and the most prominent income item among local municipalities in remote rural areas. It also clarifies causes of such changes with special attention to the policy process. First, for municipalities with a population less than 10, 000 people, I estimate a cost function of the basic fiscal need that determines the distributional structure of the local allocation tax. The result shows that the fixed cost of the function rose steadily both in absolute and relative terms between 1960 and 1993. Secondly, I examine relations between the rise in the fixed cost the policy process. The rise in the fixed cost is explained primarily by: (a) overriding allocation to public investment and the growth of public services such as fire fighting and water supply in rural areas between 1960 and 1970; (b) the establishment of a subsidy through the local allocation tax for the repayment of the rural development bond (Kaso-sai) between 1970 and 1981; and (c) the establishment of two expenditure items - development planning and welfare for the aged - between 1981 and 1993. Another critical factor for the rise is the impact of distributional changes, carried out by drastic depopulation in rural municipalities. Finally, using the data of all municipalities in Yamanashi prefecture, I examine relations between the local allocation tax and the total income of each municipality. In the 1960s, the local allocation tax functioned as a fiscal equalizer, and the distribution of subsidies created variations in total revenues among municipalities. However, after the 1960s, local allocation tax per capita and total municipal revenue came to show an outstanding significance in municipalities with a small population, most of which were in remote rural areas. Additionally, in the 1970s, the national government attached importance to demand management policies in the period of prolonged depression, and used the subsidies as a means of controlling expenditures of local municipalities. These policies raised the relative importance of subsidy within total municipal revenue, and of remote rural areas as a target of subsidy. In the 1980s, the fiscal crisis of the national government led to the cutback of the subsidies for local municipalities. The effect of the cutback was more severe in remote rural areas than in other areas. However, a local bond supplemented the cutback. As a result, no major change has been observed in the spatial pattern of the total municipal revenues.

View full abstract