Facility Management (FM) has received high attention since after Construction Workshop, Ministerial Conference on Social Capital, recommended FM as appropriate method to reform the management of public facilities in Japan, in July 2006. This article aims to describe the status of FM in Japan, trend of public facilities, the role of FM to reform of public facilities. In addition, fundamental changes in strategy and planning for facilities will be overviewed among three stages during 1950 through 2050, dividing into growing period, stable period and declining period of population.

Local governments own large amount of real estate and their ways to manage the property have a major impact on the formation of fair land prices and the realization of effective land use. In local governments, various actions for the better management of their assets, such as introducing public accounting system and constructing new legal system, have been pushed forward. On the other hand, private sector has accumulated knowledge and experience in utilizing real estate. It is required to form and maintain real estate as a national asset under cooperation between public and private sectors by establishing stable funds flow between finance and real estate. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism have been promoting effective measures and advanced actions toward adequate management of real estate from the viewpoint of utilizing public real estate. It is hoped that this report, by sorting out the backgrounds and points of the issue, would facilitate the actions to promote adequate management and to enhance the fluidity of public real estate.

The Aomori prefectural government has been promoting the facility management policy and was awarded a prize by the Japan Facility Management Promotion Association as the first initiative by the public sector.

This paper discusses the issues of facility utilization confronting the Aomori prefectural government and the introduction, main measures, future issues, and strategies in facility management policy.

At the end of this paper, I consider the issues and points for promoting the facility management policy among local governments.

Strategies for infrastructure management must be based on the concept of “tacit expectation for eternity.” This would be a principle for the administrator of infrastructures even though the variety of facilities and their characteristics are diverse. When the target of infrastructure management is discussed, it is important to know various aspects of the facilities as well as the capabilities of the administrator in advance. This will be help in identifying an appropriate solution. There are three different situations for the people engaged in infrastructure management: asset management, macromanagement, and micromanagement-and these are defined and compared to clarify the differences. Moreover, there are some conflicts between accountants and maintenance engineers concerning asset value and a description of the deterioration curves of facilities. Both sides should know each other's situation and identify a more feasible solution. The difference of capabilities between design and maintenance engineers is discussed by citing neuroscience, highlights the shortage of expert maintenance engineers.

The revitalization fund, which has been founded since around 2001, mainly aims at investing local SMEs and then leading the revitalization of local economies in Japan. This paper first focuses on the money demand aspect and confirms the importance of the profitability of invested SMEs and the discount rate of bank-deteriorated credit transferred to revitalization funds. Utilizing the cases from the Genkidase Osaka Fund, we then confirm that the use of those funds is closely associated with a higher increase in per capita sales and a higher ratio of ending up schemes during that period.

This paper analyzes the characteristics of the consciousness and behavior of local government officials with regard to communication with citizens. In particular, on the basis of a questionnaire distributed among prefecture A's officials, we analyzed the willingness to promote coproduction and community participation (communication consciousness) and measured the satisfaction with regard to communication in projects (communication behavior) by using an ordered probit model. As explanatory variables, we adopted organization and personal experience factors. The former are grades, tasks, and so on, while the latter deal with whether the officials had ever participated in community activities and the satisfaction they derived from their work. The result of our survey clarified the fact that each factor affected communication consciousness and communication behavior.