The main role of the Japan Local Government Centre has long been to support the activities of local authorities and their partners in Japan within the countries we cover, as well as supporting reciprocal links on behalf of overseas local authorities within Japan in return. In recent years, as the study of international best practice intensifies, this has seen an increase in academic exchanges in both directions, with Japanese academics keen to learn from European trends in local governance and economic development, and vice versa.
However, a third ‘spoke’ has emerged in our office’s activities as we are increasingly called upon to explain and chart trends in local autonomy in Japan by UK media. This has the beneficial effect of increasing awareness in the UK of our member authorities in Japan and the challenges and opportunities they face, fulfilling the necessary role of public diplomacy between the two countries at the local level. Here we detail some of our recent activities and interest in Japanese cities and regions from the media.
In August as the race to replace Michael Bloomberg as New York Mayor was well underway, the BBC website assessed the powers and responsibilities of the city leaders in other capitals, including Tokyo. In contrast to Mayor Bloomberg, Tokyo governor Naoki Inose governs twice the number of people and operates more city services than the City of New York. However, it was the statistic that only seven per cent of Tokyo’s revenue comes from central government which elicited the most interest – JLGC was quoted in the article in support of these facts. City finances between London, New York and Tokyo were of interest to the recent London Finance Commission, which acknowledged Tokyo’s virtual self-financing regime as an exemplar for London as it seeks more fiscal powers for itself.
The Guardian Local Leaders Network aims to offer “insight, advice and best practice” for local government in the UK and increasingly relies on case studies and reporting from overseas to inform this. In August, our chief researcher Andrew Stevens reported for the network on recent trends in Japanese local autonomy around the existence of Japan’s elected mayor system, uniformly in place since the post-war era (in contrast to England’s piecemeal adoption of the system over the past decade) and citing Kitakyushu and Hamamatsu as positive examples of innovative city leadership.
In July, Andrew reported on the curious case of the city of Yubari and its financial collapse in 2007, against the backdrop of the more recent epic bankruptcy of Detroit, with a view to informing the debate on turnaround civic leadership and reinventing cities towards more resilient economic models. Last year Andrew also considered the successes of Anglo-Japanese local partnerships for the network, against a wider backdrop of ‘de-twinning’ amid enforced local austerity in the UK.
