Public Policy, Sports Investments and Regional Development Initiatives in Japan

Abstract

Japan is the world’s greatest repository of wealth, its ‘high savings and under-consumption’ has supported ‘the US’s low-savings, high-debt regime’ for the past decade and more (McCormack, 2002: 5). Yet, since the beginning of the 1990s, the Japanese economy has been stuck in the doldrums. A loose monetary policy, delayed reorientation of the production and service sectors, and over-generous spending by central government has generated a heavy burden on Japanese corporations, small and medium-sized businesses, municipalities and individuals throughout the country. Far from being evenly balanced, the distributional patterns of the crisis are strongly bound to long-established regional disparities of productivity and prosperity. Towns, cities and rural districts of the Northeast, the South and other localities of the Japanese peripheries that always struggled to keep pace with the move towards an information- and services-based, post-Fordist, society have continued to fall behind the metropolitan areas and industrial zones of Central Honshū. Gradual industrial decline and steady population migration into the over-crowded capital and major cities have inflicted severe repercussions on the vitality of regions confronted with a rapidly aging population and a diminishing income tax base. Within this scenario, sport and leisure have been recently assigned special importance to counterbalance the widening gap between the centre and peripheries in Japan.