Japan Tests Its City Limits

Yuji Shinya, 38, doesn’t regret having stayed in this rural village of 2,000 after he left school.

Sure, many of his classmates make far more money in the big city than he ever will running a small general store. But he enjoys the slower pace. He enjoys knowing he’s part of a tightknit community where local officials are neighbors and problems can be worked out informally.

But powerful winds from Tokyo now threaten to bring more big-city ways to Yamaguchi, as pressure builds to merge the village with its 56,000-strong neighbor, Nakatsugawa.

Yamaguchi is hardly alone. Across Japan, hundreds of villages face being shaken up in similar fashion under a push by the central government and ruling party to pare the nation’s nearly 3,200 municipalities to 1,000 by 2005.

Proponents say fewer but larger cities will save money and improve efficiency. Skeptics like Shinya fear a different outcome: government that is less responsive and less convenient.

“We’re a small village, and we’re getting eaten up by the big city,” Shinya said as he made change for a customer in his cluttered shop. “The high and mighty in Tokyo make decisions from a desk far from the real world. If they want to save money, they should cut their own salaries.”

Small towns can choose to go it alone, but a system of carrots and sticks crafted by the central government makes it a costly proposition. “This utter despotism will only kill off towns and villages,” groused one group of local officials.

Exactly how the decision to merge is made can be a bit murky. Some municipalities hold public referendums, but local officials are free to ignore the results. Other municipalities don’t even bother with a vote.

Among the factors towns use in choosing a mate are proximity, shared history, and whether the prospect’s job base, hospitals and shopping are desirable.

The scramble to find partners is forcing many Japanese to rethink the role of government, the limits of local identity and the importance of running their own lives.

Squabbles have broken out between suitors over garbage collection, town hall location, even, in one case, whether the resulting town would be shaped like a doughnut.

A pervasive concern is the loss of local bragging rights. Yamaguchi, the birthplace of a famous Japanese author, worries that much larger Nakatsugawa will abscond with not only its identity but also the legacy and glory of its most famous son.

Already, the city of Iwaki, which long touted itself as “the largest in Japan in terms of acreage,” has been knocked off its pedestal by a merged Shizuoka and Shimizu, which is 11% bigger. Defiant, the residents of Iwaki say they’ll continue to feature the claim in city literature, followed by an asterisk explaining the demotion. “After all, we’ve been the largest for 37 years,” said city official Kazuo Hayasaka.

Names are another thorn. Most of the newly configured cities are taking the bigger partner’s moniker, which doesn’t sit well with the towns that lose out, especially those that trace their history to samurai days.

Even some relative Johnny-come-latelies bristle at the change. The 8,000 residents of Hawai, a town that prides itself on its links to America’s 50th state and its bureaucrats clad in aloha shirts, fret that under a proposed merger with Togo and Tomari, they would lose their glamorous if rather eccentric reputation and become just another Japanese town. “That would be a real shame,” said Mayor Masanao Inoue.

On rare occasions, however, residents are happy to shed their old marque. Kamikuishiki, a village at the base of Mt. Fuji, hopes a new name -- any name -- will weaken the association with its infamous Aum Supreme Truth cult residents, who in 1995 launched a sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway. The village plans to split itself in two, with each part joining a different set of partners.

Finally, there are a few who view the identity upheaval as a branding opportunity. One city has named itself after the mountain chain it’s in, which is a major tourist draw. Four seaside towns were set to adopt the name Amakusa Shiomaneki in honor of a local crab delicacy until someone pointed out that it sounded like the phrase “bring on death.”

And boosters in Neagari, the birthplace of New York Yankees outfielder Hideki Matsui, sought unsuccessfully to have their newly expanded municipality named Matsui City in his honor.

Most proposed mergers involve towns in the same prefecture. But at least six straddle these regional borders, prompting grander turf tussles -- akin to the outcry that might result if a California border town decided to join Nevada.

Although geography tends to exert a strong influence on merger decisions, even that’s not a given. Kawaba, a village of 4,000, announced plans to merge with 800,000-population Setagaya about 85 miles away, because of their decades of economic and community links.

“Legally it’s possible,” a central government official dryly told reporters. “Whether it’s desirable, however, is an entirely different matter.”

After the name and partnership decisions are made, there are hundreds of smaller details to work out.

Kofu and Shikishima are engaged in a spat over how to divide their shared water pipes after snubbing each other in favor of other suitors. And residents of five other towns that hoped to combine under the name Shonan worried that their city would look like a modified doughnut on a map after a sixth town voted for independence. Eventually the tensions proved too great, and the deal fell apart.

Others have grappled over combining computer systems, bus routes and address systems, not to mention which mayor to keep. Kushiro Mayor Kensuke Watanuki was tossed in jail after he allegedly engaged in vote tampering in a bid to make sure he got the upper hand.

Although Japan’s 3,200 or so municipalities may not seem excessive relative to America’s 19,300, Japan’s landmass is far smaller and its population is expected to shrink. Today 90% of Japanese cities, towns and villages have fewer than 20,000 people.

The struggle to merge goes far beyond the details, as Japanese with their small-town roots find themselves under pressure to come up with a more global mind-set.

“Even those who move to Tokyo retain a strong emotional connection to small-town life, often going back every summer to clean their family grave,” said Takashi Machimura, a sociologist at Tokyo’s Hitotsubashi University. “Changing the structure, and isolated small-town thinking, remains a key challenge in Japan.”

At a more fundamental level, many Japanese find disconcerting the prospect of a tougher, less generous Tokyo after decades of gushing subsidies. This is, after all, a country that has tended to view government as benevolent and paternalistic.

“The Japanese have a lot more trust toward the central government than Americans” do, said Kiyotaka Yokomichi, regional policy program director at the Tokyo-based National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies research center. “The structure of dependence is in the cultural fabric.” The mergers promise to reduce government costs by as much as 30% by trimming duplicate services, staff and overhead, an incentive for a government heavily in debt and facing an aging population in need of more medical care.

“The nation’s financial situation has reached a critical point,” said Hironobu Suno, an official dealing with the merger movement within the Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications.

As a byproduct, town councils are finding they must stand on their own more, and not all of them like the change. “Towns and villages are starting to realize they have to take greater care of themselves,” said Shigeyoshi Tanaka, a sociologist with Nagoya University. “If they miss the bus, they won’t have the central government to watch out for them anymore.”

This is Japan’s third major merger wave in modern history. In the late 1880s, the number of towns and villages was reduced from about 71,000 to about 16,000, and a second wave in the 1950s left the number around 3,500.

The first two rounds of consolidation brought improved services, including universal education. In this round, however -- first proposed in 1965 but lacking momentum until after 1999, when financial incentives were included -- the outlook is for hard work and little else. Critics looking for ammunition point to the city of Akiruno, where local taxes, health insurance premiums, water access charges and school lunch fees rose as much as 100% after its 1995 merger.

“This time there’s no clear return,” said Shunji Taniguchi, a government systems expert with Nomura Research Institute. “Nor has the central government done a very good job explaining why this is needed.”

Tokyo has relied on a series of incentives to push reluctant local governments to the altar.

Those that merge by March 2005 are guaranteed their current national subsidy levels for another decade along with access to special construction bonds, while cities that can claim 1 million people receive greater autonomy.

That prompted Hiratsuka, Fujisawa, Chigasaki, Samukawa, Oiso and Ninomiya, with their combined 970,066 people, to scramble madly for an additional 30,000 before the whole deal fell apart over compatibility issues.

Towns that choose to go it alone, meanwhile, risk cutbacks.

So far, the incentives seem to be working. More than 80% of the nation’s cities, towns and villages are in merger talks, while more than 40% have taken the next step by establishing a merger council to work out details.

“They say the decision is up to us, but the carrots and sticks mean it really isn’t,” said Izuru Kato, Yamaguchi’s mayor. “These arrogant Tokyo bureaucrats are trying to cover decades of mistakes and put it on our shoulders. And the local mayors are left to handle the headaches. For every 2,000 people, there are 2,000 opinions, and we’re hearing them all.”

Yamaguchi, with its cobblestone streets, wooden shops and samurai heritage, seems a world apart from merger partner Nakatsugawa, with its bland shopping malls and cookie-cutter houses.

In many ways, the two embody some of the most difficult aspects of the national movement. They’re located across prefectural lines, they involve municipalities vastly different in size, and they carry heavy historical baggage.

Residents of Yamaguchi, the birthplace of famed Japanese author Toson Shimazaki, are particularly wary of the potential for blood feuds in their community, because they’ve been through it before.

In the late 1950s, during the last merger round, a fight broke out over whether the village should remain independent. Ultimately the issue went all the way to the prime minister, who, rather than take a clear stand, opted to divide the town in two, with part remaining independent.

Yoshimi Sueki, 65, part of the anti-merger faction half a century ago, recalls neighbors throwing stones at her family, spitting on the merchandise in their shop and bugging their telephone party line.

Those like Sueki who were against the merger found their children blocked from attending local schools, forcing them to set up makeshift classrooms in neighbors’ homes.

“I was bullied so badly,” Sueki said. “The bitterness in this town didn’t disappear until just a couple of years ago. Now everyone fears it will happen all over again.”

Rie Sasaki in The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.