Japanese society is facing an aging and shrinking population. Rapid aging of the population resulting from the decline in the birth rate was predicted in the early 1960s, but the Japanese government and society could not take effective action at the time. The aging and shrinking population is now forcing municipalities to review their public facilities. Municipalities must continually control public facilities efficiently and support construction freeze. Additionally, municipalities should renovate some public facilities or rebuild them as needed. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications proposes a praise-worthy public facility management guideline for local government. Municipalities, however, need to make a fairly accurate prediction about future population and the amount of renovating and building costs. Facility management will become a crucial matter for municipalities in Japan. Of course, all this is very easy to say and a lot harder to do. Municipalities have to make every effort to start coping with the shrinking population and create a rational program for reducing useless facilities as well.

During Japan's economic growth in the 1960's, many public facilities were constructed based on future population growth. However, with the decline of economic growth and revenue shortfall from the 1970's, most public facilities could no longer be maintained. Currently, most local governments are facing the problem of aging facilities, generating issues that may cause accidents in the near future. Due to scarce funds, municipalities are planning to reduce the total size of facilities at the time of renewal. Yet this process presents many problems, such as the combination of multiple facilities, adjustments between departments in government offices, consensus building with existing users, finances, and choice of project method. In sum, the management of public facilities poses very challenging issues to most local government of Japan.

Up until the 21^st century, Japan's central and regional governments proactively constructed public facilities. The current decrease in population, however, now requires a reorganization of public facilities. At the same time, many municipalities can't demolish public facilities regardless of lack of use, because of objections from Parliament and communities. In this paper, we discuss why municipal governments can't make decisions toward demolishing public facilities.

Every local government will eventually shift to a phased reorganization of public facilities. Getting consensus among local residents, however, on merely reductions of facility-occupied floors is expected to be difficult. That makes gaining residential consensus on how to reduce facility floor space a crucial task. As the first part of the solution required to accomplish this task—reducing facility floor space while maintaining or even raising the standard of public services—seems contradictory, it will be necessary to study optimization methods based on a thorough review of the one-to-one relationship between buildings and services. Another reason that gaining consensus will be difficult is the lack of “vision of a town's future.” Furthermore, the reorganization of public facilities cannot be unrelated to the mid- to long-term future of a municipality or region. So, it is valid to plan and execute municipal contraction and facility floor reduction by extrapolating backward from the “vision of a town's future.”

In the past decades, infrastructure management has been performed based on implicit knowledge, consisting of the experience and knowledge of professional engineers. The objective of asset management is to convert such decision-making processes based on implicit knowledge and experience into systematic processes based on more formal knowledge. The current paper discusses the fundamental structure of practical management processes, which is a thoroughgoing handson approach that tries to create methodologies based on data obtained through daily and periodic inspection. Moreover, the author points out the basic issues on Japanese styles of management implementation, and also discusses the perspectives on how to implement more efficient and sustainable management cycles, which could be compatible with the concept of ISO 55001. Finally, the paper concludes by discussing strategies which enable Japanese companies to expand their business in the global market.

The restructuring of public facilities is a challenging task for persons in charge, since users and citizens often object to the abolishment or consolidation of facilities and services they enjoy. However, judging from the continuously decreasing population and presumed future financial squeeze, the task will be achieved sooner or later, whether the method is planned and appropriate or not. Various problems after restructuring efforts will emerge due to inconsistency in the restructuring of public facilities, infrastructures, land use, and urban services. Desirable and persuasive city theory and vision befitting depopulation and shrinkage will be inevitable to achieve coherent urban planning and administration.

Many local authorities have been facing difficult problems such as lack of revenues and insufficient infrastructure; they are thus struggling to supply public goods or services sufficiently. However, if such cities choose the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) scheme, they could relieve financial deficiency by benefitting from the effect of payment in installments and a fiscal standardization provided by PFI projects.

In this paper, we focus on factors affecting the initiation of PFI projects by local authorities and analyze the factors affecting the initiation PFI projects by local governments using the Tobit and OLS models.

The results of this study show that, in Japan in general, the factors having a positive impact are population, staff salary, and taxable income; in metropolitan areas, factors are population, number of the public employees per capita, and staff salary; in regional area, the only factor is population.

In particular, PFI projects require the ability of the public sector to pay back the debt and appropriate service costs for the PFI business through tax revenue or local allocation taxes over the long term.

This paper examines the effects of changes in toll systems on economic efficiency, focusing on the case of the Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway (called Shutoko in Japanese), whose toll system was shifted from a flat toll to a distance-based toll. The surplus analysis showed that the shift could increase social surplus. Before the shift, the Shutoko network consisted of three toll zones, and drivers used to have to pay a flat toll within each zone. In addition, drivers who passed through two or more toll zones had to pay for each zone. In other words, the highway company received a toll for each toll zone. After the shift, the toll was determined in accordance with distance traveled. As a result, a reduction of total tolls per trip caused an increase in the number of cross-border drivers. An increase in their surplus outweighed a decrease in the surplus from drivers within a single toll zone, which resulted in an increase in the total social surplus. In addition, it is shown that applying the Ramsey pricing rule, based on one's price elasticity of demand, to the Shutoko network could increase social surplus while toll receipts of the highway company remain unchanged.

This study discusses the role of state institutions in the creation of the moral aspect of generalized trust. In previous studies, institutions were assumed to promote trust in others as a rational calculation which is based on knowledge that institutions can impose sanctions on people's untrustworthy behaviors. In contrast, some studies point out that institutions can also create trust in others as a moral value which is beyond rational calculation. Specifically, the institutional fairness of institutions for maintaining order and the social equality achieved by welfare systems are considered to be the main determinants of moralistic trust. However, these theories have not been empirically tested, since previous studies did not differentiate calculative and moralistic aspects when measuring generalized trust. Therefore, this study measures moralistic trust separately from calculative trust, and examines the effects of perceived fairness of institutions for maintaining order and social equality on moralistic trust, using internet-based survey data collected in Japan. The results of the analysis first show us that perceived fairness of institutions for maintaining order and social equality, respectively, increase moralistic trust. Second, we find that there is a negative interaction effect between these two predictors on moralistic trust, which means that positive evaluation of social equality further promotes moralistic trust when people have less confidence in the fairness of institutions for maintaining order.