by Yunchen Tian

I arrive in Monbetsu on the evening of the town’s annual obon odori. Dusk lingers over the Sea of Okhotsk late in August, and the parking lot at Okhotsk Hyōmon no Eki is packed with attendees for the festivities downtown. The roadside station occupies the town’s old train station, which served its last passengers in 1989 when the Nayoro line became one of the earliest victims of Japan’s National Rail privatizations. Today, the building’s central location ensures that even without trains, it still functions as a center of local life, hosting a sentō bath and a supermarket.

Monbetsu, located on Hokkaido’s northeastern coast, is home to 19,369 residents as of January 2026, down from a peak of over 35,000 in 1970. Although Monbetsu remains a sub-prefectural administrative center and holds on to its airport – with a single daily ANA flight to Tokyo-Haneda – it faces the same structural headwinds affecting rural Japan: labor shortages, school closures, and an ever-older population. Much of Japan’s rural revitalization playbook will be familiar to readers of this blog: relocation incentives, empty-house banks, and the chiiki okoshi kyōryokutai (regional revitalization corps). Tourism also provides a vital lifeline for the town: it is famous for ryuuhyō, the majestic winter phenomenon of drift ice, and Monbetsu Marine Park, which hosts Japan’s only rescue center for seals. Thanks to these efforts, Monbetsu is faring better than many of its peers in Hokkaido.

However, the city has also made significant efforts of its own, distinguishing itself as a leader in recruiting and incorporating foreign labor migrants into local development strategies. The driving force of this is in the region’s seafood processing industry, another anchor of the local economy. Facing severe labor shortages, Monbetsu was an early adopter of the Technical Intern Training Program (TITP), a national scheme that allows employers to bring in foreign workers for limited periods under the banner of “skill transfer.” Local employers also eagerly accepted the SSW program, introduced in 2019. These schemes will soon be joined—and partially replaced—by the Employment by Skill Development visa, slated for introduction in 2027, which will gradually phase out TITP while attempting to address some of its well-documented problems (for a quick summary of existing programs in a regional context, see Chung and Tian 2025).

What differentiates Monbetsu is that national initiatives are implemented locally with significant support and input from local authorities. Two city-led programs have drawn praise from the Cabinet Office, national business federations, and the Hokkaido prefectural government: the establishment of a coordinator for promoting foreign talent employment (kaigai jinzai koyō suishinin) and an internship program that matches graduates of Japanese language schools in Yokohama with local employers (for example, see Nakazono 2020). Interestingly, Monbetsu’s multicultural coexistence policies are framed not merely as social inclusion measures but also regional revitalization strategies. In prefectural reports, the city’s initiatives, such as the creation of an “international exchange salon” and efforts to include foreign residents in local festivals and neighborhood associations, are listed alongside urban–rural migration and local development programs. In other words, integration policy is being reimagined as economic policy (Hokkaido Prefectural Government, 2021).

The story of the “international exchange salon” illustrates this well. Established in 2016 in a disused area of the Monbetsu Library, the salon emerged from both bottom-up and top-down observations. A Vietnamese interpreter suggested the need for a dedicated space, and the mayor noticed foreign workers gathering outside hotels and convenience stores—even during brutal winter days—to access internet that was not yet commonplace in their dormitories. Creating the salon not only offered internet access, language support, and a warm place to gather, but also assuaged local residents’ concerns that growing numbers of foreign workers could threaten public order. In 2022, the salon was replaced by the Monbetsu International Exchange Station “Smile,” located in a renovated three-story commercial building a few blocks away that was purchased by the city. Staffed by municipal officials and volunteers, the facility includes an open free space, language-learning materials, classrooms, and an auditorium. It hosts training sessions for foreign workers and their employers, as well as cultural exchange events for the wider community. Daily use by foreign residents has declined somewhat, which officials attribute to both the new location being slightly less convenient and also to expanded internet access in dormitories. Yet “Smile” continues to function as a symbolic and practical hub – a visible sign that foreign residents are part of the town’s future. Importantly, local support has remained high, in part because many of these internationalization efforts have been funded through Monbetsu’s furusato nōzei (hometown tax donation) program rather than through local tax increases: famous for its hotate scallops, Monbetsu consistently ranks in the top 10 largest recipients of furusato nōzei (Tian 2026). The results are striking for a city of under 20,000 people. As of August 2025, more than a thousand individuals, or five percent of Monbetsu’s population, now consists of foreign residents. For a town that has lost nearly half its peak population, this shift is not trivial.

Back at the obon odori, several dozen foreign residents, some dressed in yukata with the help of local volunteers at “Smile” and others in ethnic costume, join in the dance, following the rhythm of the drums. In the background, several groups of women wearing Indonesian tudong headscarves are gathering in the Indian restaurant on the corner, which serves halal dishes and has become a popular meeting spot for the city’s foreign residents.

Monbetsu’s challenges are far from solved. Labor migration programs remain temporary and tightly regulated, and policymakers have shied away from discussions of long-term settlement. Yet on this summer evening, the town feels less like a place in decline and more like a community in transition.

References:

Chung, Erin Aeran and Yunchen Tian, 2025. “Immigration Systems in Labor-Needy Japan and South Korea Have Evolved—but Remain Restrictive.” Migrationpolicy.Org, January 27. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/japan-korea-immigration-evolve.

Hokkaido Prefectural Government. 2021. “Reiwa San Dōnai Niokeru Chiiki Sōsei No Torikumi Jirei Examples of Regional Revitalization Initiatives within the Prefecture, Reiwa Year 3.” https://www.pref.hokkaido.lg.jp/ss/csr/68850.html.

Nakazono, Kiryuu. 2020. “Chiiki No ‘ Ninaite’ Toshite Gaikokujin Ginōjisshusei Wo Ukeireru Jinkōgenshō Jichitai No Kokoromi [The Trial of Towns with Population Decline in Accepting Foreign Technical Intern Trainees as the ‘supporting Hands’ of the Region].” Shokokinyuu 2020 (2): 43–63.

Tian, Yunchen. 2026. “Multi-level Migration Governance Configurations in Japan’s Regions”, 8th Conference of the Asian Borderlands Research Network, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.

Yunchen Tian (or just Tian for short) is Program-Specific Associate Professor at the Kyoto University Faculty of Law.  Their primary research interests include local revitalization and governance in Japan, migration governance and politics, the political economy of migration, and theories of the state. They were recently awarded the 2023 ISS/OUP Prize in Modern Japanese Studies for their article “Workers, Neighbours, or Something Else? Local Policies and Policy Narratives of Technical Intern Training Program Participants”.