by Paul Noah Agha Ebrahim

Japan has faced decades of sustained population decline and ageing in rural areas, a phenomenon referred to in Japanese discourse as kaso mondai (Okada 2022, p. 210). A central driver is the ongoing outmigration of young people to the greater Tokyo area, which continuously deprives rural regions of their demographic foundation (Masuda 2013). In response, the Sōmushō (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications) introduced the chiiki okoshi kyōryokutai (COKT) program in 2009. It enables people from urban areas to relocate to rural municipalities for up to three years, take on revitalization tasks, and ideally settle there permanently. The program has grown considerably since its launch, from 89 participants in 31 municipalities in its first year to 7,910 participants in 1,176 municipalities in fiscal year 2024 (Sōmushō 2025a, p. 1). Yet these figures say little about what actually constitutes the success of the program. Existing evaluations have predominantly reflected the perspective of participants, without comparing the expectations and definitions of success held by other stakeholder groups (Kuwabara 2022, p. 119). In fact, the Sōmushō, the receiving municipalities, local residents, and participants all bring fundamentally different expectations and goals to the program, and depending on which group one asks, the answer to the question of success looks quite different.

As the national funder, Sōmushō defines the program’s success primarily in terms of a measurable contribution to reversing internal migration. Participants are expected to settle permanently in their host municipality after the program ends and to establish themselves economically (Sōmushō 2026, p. 1). Since this goal is most easily expressed in quantitative terms, the ministry relies on three indicators: the settlement rate, the business start-up rate, and program scaling. According to the most recent survey, 68.9 percent of participants who completed the program between 2019 and 2023 remained in the same region, with 55.7 percent staying in the same municipality, and around 46 percent of those who stayed starting a business (Sōmushō 2025b, p. 1). All three indicators are, however, are limited, because they capture neither the long-term stability of settlement, nor the viability of businesses started, nor whether the program has actually had any effect in the participating municipalities.

Municipalities have considerable freedom in how they implement the program, but remain bound by the Sōmushō’s overarching framework. There is no single definition of success at this level. Numazakura et al. (2015a, pp. 172–173) identify three basic types of expectations. Some municipalities primarily aim for permanent settlement, others hope for an energizing impulse from outside, and others want specific tasks to be fulfilled. In practice, these types frequently overlap, which means that success at the municipal level takes the form of a community-specific profile of differently weighted expectations. Particularly consequential is the fact that many municipalities never make their definition of success explicit. They take on participants without a clear sense of what they should be doing, and frequently deploy them simply as administrative support (Numazakura et al. 2015a, pp. 164–165; 2015b, p. 101). This is also reflected in the quality of support provided. While around 95 percent of municipalities regularly exchange information with participants during their placement, this happens only on a monthly basis in around 50 percent of cases. In around 15 percent of municipalities, activity reports or regular meetings between participants and the municipal administration do not take place at all (Kuwabara 2022, p. 116). Since success on the ground always emerges from the interplay of participants, local actors, and available resources, the municipality is not merely a standard against which success is measured but also actively co-responsible for whether its own definition of success is met (Numazakura et al. 2015b, p. 112).

Local residents are those most directly affected by the consequences of depopulation. Shrinking infrastructure, school closures, the loss of medical services, and the disappearance of the labour that sustains community life shape their everyday experience (Reiher 2020, p. 237; Reiher 2025, p. 5). At the same time, they have rarely been surveyed directly on the program (Kuwabara 2022, p. 119). Existing ethnographic research suggests that residents judge participants by whether they visibly contribute to the community. In a municipality in Ōita Prefecture, older residents responded positively to younger participants because they took on tasks such as organizing festivals, helping with funerals, and maintaining communal spaces that residents themselves could no longer manage (Reiher 2020, p. 237). By contrast, residents criticized participants who, in their view, were not taking on any community tasks despite being paid from public funds (Reiher 2025, p. 5). Activities from which residents do not directly benefit tend to be seen as less of a genuine community contribution (Qu et al. 2021, p. 39). But as long as residents are not systematically surveyed across Japan, a central actor in the program remains inaccessible to both research and policy.

Participants enter the program with individual life goals. They are motivated by the desire for a better quality of life and a more meaningful daily existence, often combined with the wish to start their own business or settle permanently in a rural community (Zollet and Qu 2024, p. 5). For them, the program is a success if it enables them to build a self-determined life in the countryside, and they approach it as a preparatory phase in which they get to know the community and can make an informed decision about settling there long-term (Reiher 2020, p. 238). What participants concretely expect from their time in the program, and how they evaluate it, can be traced through the annual surveys conducted by the Japan Organization for Internal Migration (JOIN), which collect data on the motivations, satisfaction, and expectations of active participants. These data consistently show that self-realization through the activity itself is weighted most highly, above both social integration into the community and the question of what life prospects are realistic after the program ends (JOIN 2025, p. 19; Kuwabara 2022, p. 117). For participants, living and working in the countryside is a value in itself, not merely a means to the end of settling down.

Comparing the four definitions of success makes clear that no group understands success in the same way, and that even where the same terms are used, different standards are being applied. Sōmushō counts business start-ups as evidence of economic viability, while participants pursue them as an expression of self-determination (Zollet and Qu 2024, p. 5). Settlement is understood by Sōmushō as a measurable outcome at a given point in time, by municipalities as taking root socially and economically, and by participants as a possible but not primary goal. A unified definition of success is therefore structurally out of reach, since each group operates under different conditions and brings different expectations to the program (Zollet and Qu 2024, p. 10). Most urgently, the perspective of local residents needs to be made accessible through active surveys. Until that happens, their judgement on the program, the judgement of those most directly affected by depopulation, will remain largely unheard.

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References

JOIN (Japan Organization for Internal Migration) (2025), “Chiiki okoshi kyōryokutai no genjō to kadai — Reiwa 6-nendo chiiki okoshi kyōryokutai ankēto shūkei kekka no gaiyō” [Current Status and Issues of the Chiiki Okoshi Kyōryokutai — Summary of the Fiscal Year 2024 Survey Results], Tokyo: Ijū-Kōryū Suishin Kikō, February 2025.

Kuwabara, Yoshiki (2022), “Chiiki okoshi kyōryokutai no genjō to kadai / Current Status and Issues of the Chiiki Okoshi Kyōryokutai”, in: Nōson Keikaku Gakkai-shi [Journal of the Society for Rural Planning], 41 (3), pp. 114–119.

Masuda, Hiroya (2013), “The Death of Regional Cities: A horrendous simulation — Regional Cities Will Disappear by 2040, A Polarized Society will Emerge”, in: Discuss Japan — Japan Foreign Policy Forum, No. 17–18.

Numazakura, Hitomi; Imai, Futoshi; Shikita, Mai (2015a), “Chiiki okoshi kyōryokutai no sugata — Taiin, shichōson, chiiki sorezore no mesen kara (chū)” [The Picture of the Chiiki Okoshi Kyōryokutai — From the Perspectives of Members, Municipalities, and Regions (Part 2)], in: Chihō Zaimu [Municipal Finance], 736, pp. 164–180.

Numazakura, Hitomi; Imai, Futoshi; Shikita, Mai (2015b), “Chiiki okoshi kyōryokutai no sugata — Taiin, shichōson, chiiki sorezore no mesen kara (ge)” [The Picture of the Chiiki Okoshi Kyōryokutai — From the Perspectives of Members, Municipalities, and Regions (Part 3)], in: Chihō Zaimu [Municipal Finance], 737, pp. 92–113.

Okada, Norio (2022), “Rethinking Japan’s depopulation problem: Reflecting on over 30 years of research with Chizu Town, Tottori Prefecture and the potential of SMART Governance”, in: Contemporary Japan, 34 (2), pp. 210–227. https://doi.org/10.1080/18692729.2022.2131991

Qu, Meng; Coulton, T.M.; Funck, Carolin (2021), “Gaps and Limitations — Contrasting Attitudes to Newcomers and Their Role in a Japanese Island Community”, in: Bulletin of the Hiroshima University Museum, 12, pp. 31–46.

Reiher, Cornelia (2020), “Embracing the periphery: urbanites’ motivations to relocate to rural Japan”, in: Manzenreiter, Wolfram; Lützeler, Ralph; Polak-Rottmann, Sebastian (eds.), Japan’s New Ruralities: Coping with Decline in the Periphery, New York: Routledge, pp. 229–247.

Reiher, Cornelia (2025), “(In)visible newcomers: Foreign workers and internal urban-rural migrants in Japan’s countryside”, in: Journal of Rural Studies, 114, 103561. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2025.103561

Sōmushō (2025a), “Reiwa 6-nendo chiiki okoshi kyōryokutai no taiin-sū nado ni tsuite” [On the Number of Members of the Chiiki Okoshi Kyōryokutai in Fiscal Year 2024], 4 April 2025.

Sōmushō (2025b), “Reiwa 6-nendo chiiki okoshi kyōryokutai no teijū jōkyō nado ni kakaru chōsa kekka” [Survey Results on the Settlement Situation of the Chiiki Okoshi Kyōryokutai in Fiscal Year 2024], 4 April 2025.

Sōmushō (2026), “Chiiki okoshi kyōryokutai ni tsuite” [On the Chiiki Okoshi Kyōryokutai]. https://www.soumu.go.jp/main_content/001052332.pdf (accessed 30 March 2026).

Zollet, Simona; Qu, Meng (2024), “Revitalising rural areas through counterurbanisation: Community-oriented policies for the settlement of urban newcomers”, in: Habitat International, 145, 103022. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2024.103022

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Paul Noah Agha Ebrahim is a student in the BA program in Japanese Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.

by Cornelia Reiher

The literature on urban-rural migration in Japan discusses various types of migrants, including people of all ages and genders, as well as Japanese and foreign migrants. It also covers return migrants who were born and raised in the countryside, moved away and later returned, as well as new residents who live in the countryside for the first time. While our project on urban-rural migration in Kyushu has focused mainly on working-age migrants, I also met many so-called retirement migrants during fieldwork. The majority of these retirement migrants in my field sites were return migrants. Born and raised in Kyushu, they left their hometowns at a young age to attend university in a larger city, before moving to Tokyo or Osaka to work. Upon retiring, they moved back to their hometowns and into their family homes. The elderly residents I met in my field sites at local festivals, in the streets, at concerts, their businesses or at the library were in good spirits and excited to talk to me. In this blog post, I will introduce a married couple of retirement migrants that I met and describe their everyday life after returning to their hometown.

In spring 2023, I met Shintaro and Kimiko for the first time at a soba-making workshop in a community center in a small town in Kyushu. Every month, ten elderly residents of the town gather in the community center’s large kitchen to make their own soba. All of the members of the soba club are over 70 years old and retired. Some had lived in their hometown their whole lives, while others had worked elsewhere before returning after successful careers in Tokyo. They worked in insurance, as flight attendants, in IT, and as teachers. Now retired, they stay busy participating in community activities, such as organizing festivals, teaching traditional crafts and cooking classes, going to concerts at the local concert hall, and attending other community events. Most also do some part-time farming for fun.

Shintaro is the instructor who teaches participants how to make soba. During the course, he showed me how to knead the dough. After rolling the dough out first into a circle and then into a square, we began cutting it. We used a large soba knife and a wooden tool to determine the thickness of the noodles. At first, my noodles were very thick, but I got better as I went along. I was very proud of my first homemade soba noodles. Afterwards, all the participants in the course ate together and then cleaned the kitchen. They happily chatted away. Since most of the participants had known each other since childhood, they teased each other and shared gossip about mutual acquaintances. After lunch, they showed me pictures and videos of their children, grandchildren, and the latest local festivals. 

After the soba course, Shintaro and Kimiko invited me to their home. The couple owns two houses on the same property, which is surrounded by fields where they grow their own vegetables and rice. They send some of the rice to their adult children, who live in the Kanto area. The couple lives in the new house. Until recently, Shintaro’s mother lived in the old house, where he grew up. Sadly, she passed away at the age of over 100. Kimiko, Shintaro’s wife, makes bamboo baskets and stores them in the old house. She showed me all sorts of bamboo baskets and bowls that she had made while attending a class. Since the teacher recently passed away, she now leads the class. The course participants go out to cut the bamboo themselves to ensure the quality of the bamboo. As fewer people are taking care of the bamboo, it is growing wild and encroaching on houses. In some cases, it is even causing houses to collapse, so people in the area are happy when it is cut down.

Shintaro and Kimiko are from the same town and met in high school. Shintaro lived in a dormitory because his high school was too far away. Kimiko attended college in Kumamoto, while Shintaro studied in Kitakyushu. They got married at 24, moved to Kansai, and started working: he in IT and she as a teacher. They then moved to the Kanto area, later settling in Tokyo. Kimiko quit her job and they had two children. Later she pursued pottery as a hobby. Their house is filled with beautiful handmade ceramics. After Shintaro retired, they returned to Kyushu while their adult children remained in the Kanto area with their families. Shintaro and Kimiko built a house next to his parents’ home to take care of them. They are “retirement U-turners,” and farming and their other activities keep them busy with attending and teaching courses. Recently, they celebrated their golden wedding anniversary.

Both Shintaro and Kimiko are happy to be back in their hometown. They enjoy the slow life amidst nature, and they have the means to do so. Their participation in community activities is important for maintaining these activities and the community itself. Return migrants in their 60s and 70s play an important role in preserving local culture and activities. Unlike elderly people who have lived in the countryside all their lives and are often not wealthy, the U-turn retirement migrants have financial and other resources they can share. And they are happy to contribute and give back to their rural hometowns.

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”.