This book project investigates changing state-society relations in Japan’s rapidly aging rural areas. Rural and semi-urban areas have been struggling with the adverse effects of aging, depopulation, and fiscal and economic dependency for decades. The problems are particularly pronounced in places that have been affected by the mid-2000s merger wave, in which many rural towns and villages became parts of larger municipalities. The retreat of the state gave additional weight to the question of who is responsible for governing decline in Japan’s aging rural peripheries.

In this context, the central government has been promoting so called “regional management organizations” (chiiki unei soshiki, RMO) since 2015, i.e., sub-municipal civic self-governance bodies expected to devise and implement plans to sustain local livelihoods in cooperation with local governments. The number of these organizations has increased rapidly in recent years, to now more than 7,000 (MIC 2023). This rapid increase raises questions of broader empirical and theoretical relevance regarding the role and the legitimacy of civic associations as supplements of public administrations, and the (re)distribution of responsibilities between the local state and civil society in declining regions more generally.

By tracing the institutional genesis of RMO and their path from local models onto the national political agenda, the book contributes to the comparative literature on state-society relations in Japan, which has often pointed to the prevalence of civic associations that “straddle” the state-society divide and their lasting role in the governance of local places (Pekkanen 2006; Read and Pekkanen 2009; Funck/Sorensen 2007). While the existing literature has mostly focused on urban areas, this book asks how and by whom established patterns of state-society cooperation are altered and reproduced in rural areas from which the state itself has retreated due to fiscal decentralization and administrative restructuring. Adopting a historical institutional perspective, the analytical focus lies on the question how existing institutions - such as neighborhood associations or earlier forms of community-level "town-making" - are built into new, more comprehensive self-governance organizations.  

The research project mainly draws from in-depth field research in three municipalities: Iida City in Nagano Prefecture (July 2017, August 2018, September 2022), Unnan City in Shimane Prefecture (September 2022, July 2024) and Ena City in Gifu Prefecture (September 2022, July 2024). While Iida and Unnan are prominent local models that have influenced the national RMO concept, Ena cannot be considered a model case. Field research in the three field sites included interviews with residents, local officials, representatives of RMO, document collection, and (participatory) observation in meetings, events, etc.

Additionally, the book relies on the analysis of government-sponsored surveys and reports on RMO and expert interviews. 

The political promotion of RMO reproduces the established notion of civic associations acting as “partners” of the state. However, the book argues that their rapid increase is best explained not by direct government cooptation, but by the absence of coherent formal institutions for sub-municipal decentralization, which remained underdeveloped despite massive administrative scale-enlargement. The resulting political-administrative vacuum gave rise to a variety of local attempts to establish sub-municipal decentralization “from below”.

The national promotion of RMO since 2015 has amplified these local responses. Yet, both pioneer municipal-level models and the central government leave important aspects of local governance largely unregulated. In the vacuum created by the retreat of the local state, some RMO have developed into civic quasi-governments with extensive functions – despite (or rather: because of) the lack of a solid legal basis. On the flipside, in the absence of  legally defined rules and standards, many other RMO remain unwilling or unable to answer the increasing expectations toward civic self-governance in shrinking rural areas.