Stockholm Seminar on Japan: The politics of periphery and depopulation: Japan and Sweden
As in many other places, the question of depopulating and economically disadvantaged communities, primarily in rural areas, has been a salient political issue for both Japan and Sweden. For decades, Japanese administrations have promoted the “balanced development of the nation” and “regional revitalization”, with concerns raised that nearly half of all municipalities will become “extinct” due to ongoing depopulation.
Recent Swedish administrations have addressed a widening gap between growing cities and shrinking communities, with politicians of all stripes promising that “all of Sweden should live”. Though in many ways very different demographically, culturally, and institutionally, both Japan and Sweden are interesting cases to compare. Both have largely avoided the kind of populist backlash from such “left-behind places” as observed elsewhere. The seminar compares the politics of peripheralizing areas in both cases, focusing on the discourse – language, assumptions, and ideas held by political actors – about these demographically and economically-challenged regions in the respective countries. We hopefully gain greater insight into an issue that potentially can yet destabilize mainstream politics in both.
Speaker: Professor Ken Victor Leonard Hijino, Graduate School of Law, Kyoto University, and currently guest researcher at Department of Human Geography, Uppsala University.
His recent publications include articles for the Journal of Rural Affairs, Electoral Studies, and International Journal of Asian Studies. He is the author of Local Politics and National Policy (Routledge, 2017). He received his PhD from the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Cambridge in 2008 and before his academic career he was a reporter for the Financial Times in Tokyo.
Moderator: Åsa Malmström Rognes, Head of the Asia Programme