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YUZAWA, Japan: It’s noon on a hot day in the Japanese city where Yoshihide Suga, Japan’s next prime minister, grew up, but more than half of the stores in a downtown shopping arcade are closed and the sidewalks are empty except by the few older passersby.
A building that proclaims “I love Yuzawa” is abandoned. A nearby giant department store looms over the street, mostly unusable because it doesn’t meet earthquake safety standards, but it’s too expensive to tear down.
The remote part of Yuzawa where Suga grew up, 480 km northeast of Tokyo, captures the key challenges his administration will face: Half of the residents in the area are over 60 years old. Depopulation and aging have meant a dramatic drop in tax revenue, prompting the city government, dependent on Tokyo’s support, to consider merging with other cities in Akita prefecture.
“Japan is the fastest aging nation in the world, Akita the fastest aging prefecture and Yuzawa one of the worst in Akita,” said city employee Toru Abe, noting that about 40 percent of all residents of Yuzawa are over 65, compared to 28 percent for the nation.
“If we didn’t have fiscal support from the central government, we couldn’t make ends meet,” Abe said. Of the city’s 27 billion yen ($ 250 million) annual budget, he said, only a fifth comes from taxes.
Suga is on track to be elected leader of Japan’s ruling party on Monday and elected prime minister on Wednesday, succeeding Shinzo Abe, who resigned for health reasons.
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Yuzawa, who sees 2 million snowfalls that locals say make it difficult, has marked Suga, 71, as a self-made politician among hereditary lawmakers from wealthy families. It has also influenced his best-known policies.
These include the promotion of inbound tourism, the reform of the country’s vast network of agricultural cooperatives, and the introduction of a “local tax,” a system that allows people to pay local taxes in an area other than where they live and in return , get deductions and local delicacies like beef or rice.
“He talked about it long before then, saying he grew up in Akita and benefited from the tax income, then he moved here and feels strange without paying anything. He wondered if there was a system to make it possible,” Hiromi Okazaki said, a retired Bureaucrat who worked for Suga in the Home Office when Suga ran it and introduced the plan in the 2000s.
‘WE BUY CIGARETTES!’
Most Yuzawa residents blame the devastating population decline for the economic decline, largely due to a low birth rate and a lack of jobs in the city that relies primarily on growing rice.
In 1955, Yuzawa had 80,000 residents, some working in a now depleted silver mine. Since then, the population has been cut in half. Only 442 high school students graduated last year.
With 16.4 deaths per 1,000 residents in 2019, Akita has the highest death rate in Japan. That compares with 11.2 deaths nationwide. Its birth rate, 4.9 per 1,000, is the lowest in Japan.
City officials project 400 million yen ($ 3.8 million) in revenue from Suga’s “local tax” in the fiscal year through March. It’s not enough to turn your luck, they say, but in Yuzawa, everything helps.
Next to a row of cigarette vending machines in the city center hangs a sign: “Tobacco taxes are important to our area. Let’s buy cigarettes!” In 2019, the tax raised 209 million yen, he says.
In 2015, Akita put together a plan to halt demographic decline with measures such as expanding medical allowances for schoolchildren, providing additional support at daycare, and helping workers pay off student loans. But local residents say it is difficult to revive an aging economy.
“If only we had places that people wanted to go, like shops,” said Momoko Takahashi, 33, a native of Yuzawa, who is preparing to open a cafe in October. “Even a large supermarket would help.”
STRAWBERRY FIELDS
Suga’s family home is still in a remote part of Yuzawa, empty since his elderly mother moved into a nursing home three years ago.
Akinomiya village was known for its rice fields, and adult male farmers left their families each winter to work in Tokyo to make ends meet, a practice that Suga’s father, Wasaburo, helped weed out by venturing into the most lucrative strawberry crop and form a cooperative. .
“He would have seen his father’s thinking, his father’s initiatives and that would have grown in him naturally,” said Masashi Yuri, 71, who lived a few houses from Suga.
Suga helped out in the strawberry fields and was quiet and stubborn as a classmate, practicing baseball for hours at night to get the third base spot he wanted, Yuri said.
“He doesn’t show anything on his face, he doesn’t show his emotions, but in the shadows, he makes extreme efforts,” Yuri said.
Of the 200 strawberry growers who made the area famous for their summer berry tartlets, only about 60 remain. More than half are elderly.
