Japanese society begins shrinking as far as the population is concerned from 2004. In this situation, the population of most community and local society also begins shrinking.

What will shrinking of the population in community cause to its community? We have to explore this problem and propose how to establish its policy. About the influence of shrinking of the population in community, there are two opposite opinions. Takegawa asserts that the process of shrinking of the population already began past 20 years ago and that there is no new social phenomenon which we should study. But I insist opposite opinion that recent shrinking of the population brings fundamental community change. We can find such community change in the community structure and the principle on which community is base. Through explication of the change of the community structure and its principle, we could propose its public policy.

This paper describes how municipalities in Sorachi area has drawn to the result of almost bankrupted situation after the landslide mine closures in 1980s. The case of Yubari city, once called “coal capital of the north" but now owes over 300 million US$ debt because of the over-investment for non-contextualized tourist attractions, lies at the heart of this failure. To depict this process necessarily request researchers to analyze how and why conventional regional policies of the state kept failing to“regenerate" these depopulated area. The problem factors I shall suggest includes the tendency to obliterate the history of rnining, policy orientation to depend on public construction works rather than social education, and uncoordinated investments. We should remove this inertia stemrning from conventional developmentalist regime, and should seek for true regeneration through contemplating the historical meaning of coalmining, which has been the incubator industry of high-tech Japan.

The relationship between rural communities and urban areas is constituted by two vectors: one leading from the rural communities to urban areas, and the other leading from urban areas to rural communities.

The first vector is constituted by movements of people and agricultural products from rural communities to urban areas, a development that harks back to Japan's urbanization in the wake of the project of modernization in the 1880's. In order to survive in urban areas, people from the same hometown created so called Dokyo-kai, mutual aid associations made up mostly of lower middle class and working class members.

The second vector, leading from the urban centres to the rural communities, is constituted by (1) the increasing penetration of urban lifestyles and modes of production in the countryside，(2) the establishment of factories in rural areas，(3)the diversification of dwellers in the countryside，(4) the temporal influx of city dwellers into rural communities for recreation and tourism，(5) state subsidies redistributing tax wealth from urban areas to rural communities, (6) the ‘export' of waste material and dangerous facilities such as nuclear power plants, and (7) the flow of remittances and other contributions from urban migrants to their rural hometowns and relatives (e.g. aged parents).

Through this mutual exchange relationship with urban centres, rural communities sustain and reinvigorate their own production.

According to the previous studies on Toyota automobile workers, they would not participate in social activities, for they are forced to work hard under pressure featuring Toyota Production System and alienated from their neighborhoods, which are dominated by old residents. However, due to structural changes around local communities in recent years, Toyota workers have gradually formed social ties in their neighborhoods, have begun enjoying personal lives and actively committing to various social activities.

Based on the data from the questionnaire survey conducted in 2009, the present paper will illustrate and examine the contour of the local class structure and the social consciousness of residents in Toyota Furthermore interestingly, as will be shown in a regression analysis, it is the accumulation of social networks embedded in local communities that has brought about this change.

The main aim of this essay is to make clear the affect of local context in the process of social construction of sacred place based on my field work on Bodh Gaya, Bihar, India. It is said that Bodh Gaya, a small town in Bihar India, is the most sacred place in the Buddhist world. Today, it continues to attract Buddhists from all over the world with so many ways of worship that celebrate Buddha's enlightenment. There are number of Buddhist temples built by foreign Buddhists especially from Asia around the Mahabodhi Temple, which was originally built by King Ashoka to celebrate and praise Buddha.

It should be stressed that the Mahabodhi Temple or area surrounding it had been forgotten by Buddhists for a long time and, moreover, recognition or promotion of the place as a scared place was largely due to the contribution of social agents from outside of local society.

Here I suggested that the construction of the Mahabodhi temple and the area surrounding it is closely related and affected by the change of social system of the local society, which has been largely dominated by traditional rule. In this vein, two points can be put forward based on my research. Firstly, the role of local society for the construction of the sacred place remains to be minimal until the independence of India from British rule and, secondly, along with social changes brought about in the making of modern India, local society of Bodh Gaya has produced two types of reorganization related with the construction of the sacred place.