{"id":8438,"date":"2011-01-24T18:06:30","date_gmt":"2011-01-24T09:06:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=8438"},"modified":"2011-01-24T18:09:08","modified_gmt":"2011-01-24T09:09:08","slug":"economist-com-offers-microcosm-of-nagasaki-example-of-japans-urban-decline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=8438","title":{"rendered":"Economist.com offers microcosm of Nagasaki as example of Japan’s urban decline"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Hi Blog. The Economist last week had quite a bleak article about Nagasaki, and used it as an example of Japan’s urban decline. Of course, it hints at the possibility of urban renewal through influxes of people (using the oft-cited policy panacea of “foreign students<\/a>“). But again, not immigration. As far as Debito.org is concerned, the best bit of the article is:<\/p>\n

====================================
\nCan Nagasaki pull out of the spiral? Historically, after all, the city is Japan\u2019s most open, allowing in Dutch and Chinese merchants in the 17th-19th centuries when foreign trade with the rest of the country was banned. Nagasaki is one of the closest cities to China and South Korea, with opportunities for tourism and trade. The museum to the atom bomb and its victims is world famous. Nagasaki is the birthplace of Japanese Christianity. It was a cradle of insurrection against the last shogunate, helping to shove Japan into the modern age with the Meiji Restoration of 1868.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/em> <\/strong><\/p>\n

To reverse the decline, Mr Sato has drawn up a plan with local officials that looks for overseas revenues to make up for falling domestic ones. That is hardly revolutionary. Among the goals are doubling numbers of foreign students, to 3,000; turning the shipyard into a tourist site; and bolstering sales of kamaboko, a rubbery fishcake. But asked about bolder measures such as encouraging foreign investment and skilled immigrants, Mr Sato says there is \u201cnot the right environment\u201d for that yet.<\/em>
\n<\/strong>====================================<\/p>\n

Still wondering if the “yet” ever expires, even as things go down and down. Arudou Debito<\/p>\n

Full article follows:
\n\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/<\/p>\n

The alarm bells of Nagasaki
\nJapan\u2019s \u201cwindow on the world\u201d is now a window on what ails the country
\nUrban decline in Japan
\nEconomist.com Jan 13th 2011 | NAGASAKI | from PRINT EDITION<\/strong>
\nhttp:\/\/www.economist.com\/node\/17909982?story_id=17909982<\/a><\/p>\n

AT 60, Hiroshi Ikeguchi wryly describes himself as one of the youngest in his district. He has lived his whole life in Irifune, just above the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries shipyard. But like his ageing neighbours, the Nagasaki suburb is collapsing around him. A dozen houses have been left to rot after their owners have died. Some are piles of timber; in others, katsura trees grow through the roofs. Outside one is a new year\u2019s offering of fruit left by a neighbour who still laments how the death of the \u201ckind old lady\u201d who lived there went undiscovered for a week. Peer through the letterbox, and in the gloom you see a calendar pinned to the wall. The date is September 1988.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

In Mr Ikeguchi\u2019s youth, when Nagasaki was rebuilding itself after nuclear devastation in 1945, the streets near his house rang with the sound of shipwrights walking to the Mitsubishi yard each morning. Now Nagasaki\u2019s economy has gone still. The port city\u2019s fortunes show how three forces sapping Japan\u2019s energies\u2014depopulation, overcentralisation and foreign competition\u2014are hurting not just rural backwaters but once-prosperous cities on Japan\u2019s fringe. The phenomenon remains partly hidden. Residents of luxury apartments across the bay complain about Irifune\u2019s shabby appearance. If only they knew, Mr Ikeguchi says, how bad it really is.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Nagasaki\u2019s troubles are self-reinforcing, argues Takamitsu Sato, president of the Nagasaki Economic Research Institute. Since the 1960s a brain drain has sucked people towards Osaka and Tokyo. Young people who left to find jobs elsewhere never came back. Even now, seven in ten college students leave to study, and over half of young people find jobs elsewhere.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The brain drain reinforces a demographic trend. The prefecture\u2019s working-age population has shrunk from over 1m in 1990 to 874,000 in 2008, a result both of the exodus and a declining birth rate. The prefecture of 1.45m is shrinking and ageing so fast that one of Nagasaki\u2019s main department stores, Tamaya, has closed down its children\u2019s department and stocked up on undergarments and hearing aids. With shrinking investment, and fewer jobs and young families, new house-building has fallen by half in the past ten years.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

So now Nagasaki\u2019s living standards are falling too, a shock in a country where economists said that individuals could be better off even if the overall economy shrank in size. Mr Sato\u2019s institute reckons that if today\u2019s trends continue, GDP per person will fall from \u00a53.26m ($28,000) in 2007 to \u00a53.14m by 2020. Everything, he says, is going downward.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Can Nagasaki pull out of the spiral? Historically, after all, the city is Japan\u2019s most open, allowing in Dutch and Chinese merchants in the 17th-19th centuries when foreign trade with the rest of the country was banned. Nagasaki is one of the closest cities to China and South Korea, with opportunities for tourism and trade. The museum to the atom bomb and its victims is world famous. Nagasaki is the birthplace of Japanese Christianity. It was a cradle of insurrection against the last shogunate, helping to shove Japan into the modern age with the Meiji Restoration of 1868.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

To reverse the decline, Mr Sato has drawn up a plan with local officials that looks for overseas revenues to make up for falling domestic ones. That is hardly revolutionary. Among the goals are doubling numbers of foreign students, to 3,000; turning the shipyard into a tourist site; and bolstering sales of kamaboko, a rubbery fishcake. But asked about bolder measures such as encouraging foreign investment and skilled immigrants, Mr Sato says there is \u201cnot the right environment\u201d for that yet.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Nagasaki\u2019s once-mighty shipping industry has been keelhauled by South Korean and Chinese yards with lower costs and quicker thinking. And Mr Ikeguchi says that even modest government initiatives, like demolishing abandoned houses in Irifune to attract newcomers, take years to grind through city hall.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Like the elders of Nagasaki, the prime minister, Naoto Kan, realises that Japan must look abroad since its own markets are shrinking. At the start of 2011, he declared (143 years after the fact, some might say) that this was the \u201cfirst year of opening Japan to the outside world\u201d in the modern era. Nagasaki is a good example of why action needs to be swift and bold.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Correction<\/strong>: 1.45m people live in the prefecture of Nagasaki, not the city as we originally wrote. This was corrected on January 18th 2011.<\/em><\/p>\n

ENDS<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Economist last week had quite a bleak article about Nagasaki, and used it as an example of Japan’s urban decline. Of course, it hints at the possibility of urban renewal through influxes of people (using the oft-cited policy panacea of “foreign students”). But again, not immigration. As far as Debito.org is concerned, the best bit of the article is:<\/p>\n

====================================
\nCan Nagasaki pull out of the spiral? Historically, after all, the city is Japan\u2019s most open, allowing in Dutch and Chinese merchants in the 17th-19th centuries when foreign trade with the rest of the country was banned. Nagasaki is one of the closest cities to China and South Korea, with opportunities for tourism and trade. The museum to the atom bomb and its victims is world famous. Nagasaki is the birthplace of Japanese Christianity. It was a cradle of insurrection against the last shogunate, helping to shove Japan into the modern age with the Meiji Restoration of 1868.<\/p>\n

To reverse the decline, Mr Sato has drawn up a plan with local officials that looks for overseas revenues to make up for falling domestic ones. That is hardly revolutionary. Among the goals are doubling numbers of foreign students, to 3,000; turning the shipyard into a tourist site; and bolstering sales of kamaboko, a rubbery fishcake. But asked about bolder measures such as encouraging foreign investment and skilled immigrants, Mr Sato says there is \u201cnot the right environment\u201d for that yet.
\n====================================<\/p>\n

Still wondering if the “yet” ever expires, even as things go down and down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,4,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-immigration-assimilation","category-japanese-government","category-unsustainable-japanese-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8438\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}