Can municipal mascots halt population decline in rural areas?
There are literally thousands of municipal mascots (or yuru-chara) in Japan, across the public sector.
Motomiya City (population 30,000), the smallest municipality of Fukushima Prefecture in North East Japan, has since 2019 embarked on a project to assemble all those with the given name Mayumi across Japan as allies of its own local mascot ‘Mayumi-chan’.
Inspired by local government officer Mayumi-san, who took part in an event by Motomiya City Hall’s Migration and Settlement Division, the Nationwide Mayumi-chan Exchange Project is a fun way to not only promote civic pride in the municipality, but also generate national PR for the city as a place to relocate.
We have now uploaded Motomiya City Government’s recent presentation on the project as a case study to our website (PDF).
