How Does the National Domestic Migration Promotion Policy from Urban to Rural Areas Let Rural Areas Transform?

This presentation will introduce that Japan's domestic migration promotion policy is progressing rapidly from 2009, and consider the merits and demerits of what this policy brings to rural villages. In Japanese rural areas, depopulation, low birthrate and aging, imbalance development compared to cities have become major serious difficult issues since the 1960s. Countermeasures against these issues by the state were public works and infrastructure development, but, from the 2000s, policies to supply support human resources to rural areas started. It is “Community-Reactivating Cooperator Squad”, which was initiated by the government from 2009. Local governments employ citizen residents who are interested in revitalization of rural areas and rural life as regional cooperation volunteers up to 3 years. The national government pays their expenses. The amount is 4 million yen a year for each member. The number of members in the whole country started 89 people in 31 municipalities, but in 2016 it grew to 3978 in 886 municipalities. About 60% of the members settled in the same area after the term of office. In general, it is evaluated as an effective countermeasure. Meanwhile, from my empirical investigation, in reality local governments and migrants are confused. Local governments do not know how to handle migrants, and migrants do not know what to do as a rural promotion activity. The administration couldn’t provide effective support for settlement and employment. Urban residents move to rural areas through pluralistic motivations, for example, a desire to withdraw from urban neoliberalism. However, they tend to be judged by performance-based-evaluation of what kind of activities they conduct in rural areas. People with extremely neoliberal characteristics tend to remain, and human resources become extremely unified. Resulting in rather than being sustained as traditional rural areas, they are strongly incorporated by capitalistic free competition, depending on each efforts and self-responsibility.