Japan Tests Its City Limits | LA Times

[Ediacara]

Japan Tests Its City Limits
-Under pressure from a central government bent on saving money, municipalities are merging faster than you can say 'loss of identity.'

By Mark Magnier, Times Staff Writer


YAMAGUCHI, Japan — 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.

More at the Los Angeles Times

[dArKeR]

1. Japan is such a nice place. It doesn't take much common sense

to figure out the entire country will be rolled over in concrete eventually. As will the world as the populations grow.

[Art_from_Ark]

2. Annexation does not automatically mean loss of identity

For example, annexed/merged villages in Japan will keep their community centers, their train stations and post offices will keep their original names, and the old city hall will stay open as a branch. School names will remain unchanged, although administration of public schools will be transferred to the dominant municipality.

The new address will also reflect the status before annexation. In a nutshell, there are no street addresses in Japan (and not many street names, either). People are known by the district in which they live, not by the street they live on. For example, the street I live on has no name-- my "street address" contains the name of my district-- Nakano-- as well as the neighborhood's name-- Takaoka-- which was the name of the hamlet 50 years ago, before it was annexed in the first post-war wave of municipal mergers. The local people consider themselves residents of Takaoka first, and XXX city second.