This book project investigates how state-society relations in rural Japan change in the context of rapid aging, depopulation, and eroding public service provision, and the mid-2000s municipal merger wave. These interrelated developments gave weight to the question who is responsible for “governing decline” in rural Japan – the state, local communities, or both? In 2014, the Japanese government began to promote so-called regional management organizations (RMO, chiiki unei soshiki): civic self-governance bodies which are expected to devise and implement plans to supplement public and private service provision at the sub-municipal level. The number of RMO has increased rapidly since 2014, which underlines the growing demand for civic self-governance especially in rural areas from which the state has retreated.

So far, however, RMO have received virtually now scholarly attention outside Japan. This book asks where these organizations come from, what they do, and how they relate to the (local) state.    

Mirroring the research objectives, I triangulate the analysis of government-sponsored survey reports, documents and expert interviews with three nested case studies. Iida City in Nagano Prefecture (July 2017, August 2018, September 2022) and Unnan City in Shimane Prefecture (September 2022, July 2024) are prominent local models that have influenced the national RMO concept. In contrast, Ena City in Gifu Prefecture (September 2022, July 2024) cannot be considered a model case. The case studies are based on interviews with residents, local officials, representatives of self-governance organizations, document collection, and participatory observation.

Genesis and promotion of RMO reveal how the “blurry” state-society relations in Japan are reproduced beyond top-down cooptation. The RMO concept rests on local institution-building processes that preceded the national promotion of RMO, and local actors continue to shape the concrete roles and functions of RMO beyond the direct control of the central and even local governments.   

RMO supplement the functions of local governments and preexisting self-governance organizations, most importantly neighborhood associations. While their roles and functions differ, RMO reproduce the notion of civil society organizations as “partners” of the local state. Operating in the vacuum left by the retreat of the state in the mid-2000s merger wave, RMO – the vast majority of which lack a formal legal standing – blur the lines between public administration and civic self-governance even further.

The process reveals Japan’s aging rural peripheries as important experimentation grounds for local self-governance – despite, or rather because they have been “left behind” in many ways.