The Tai­pei Song­shan Airport is a crowded, busy place that reverberates with conversations and frequent PA announcements. Ta­ke­shi C.Y. Lin is passing through once again, a single suitcase in hand. His many business trips to Japan over the last several years have made the airport as familiar to him as his own home. How many times did he visit Japan last year? “Six.” There’s a smile on his face, but his exhaustion shows.

Lin is the CEO of Ha­ya­shi Office, where his work focuses on service-design and social-design consulting. His rapidly growing business last year took him to rural parts of Japan’s Mi­ya­zaki, ­Ehime, and Ya­ma­gata Pre­fectures. Taiwanese tourists rarely visit these areas, so he provided them with a Taiwanese perspective on their travel and product offerings. “Right now, every part of Japan is battling for tourism from Taiwan,” he explains. The seemingly never-ending call for his services points to the Japanese public and private sectors’ commitment to implementing the country’s “regional revitalization” program.

The concept of regional revitalization, an approach to rescuing rural areas from decline, is spreading like wildfire.

Rescuing rural areas

In August 2014 Hi­roya Ma­suda, a former minister for internal affairs and communications and visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, published Local Extinctions. The book caused an uproar in Japan by enumerating a number of factors that have led many smaller municipalities to the brink of extinction. These include the country’s declining birthrate and aging population, as well as Tokyo’s ongoing growth. (The city, already the world’s largest with a population of roughly 30 million, has continued to grow at a rate of about 100,000 people per year.) The Abe government is aware of the problem, and has made regional re­vital­iza­tion a national policy priority. As a case in point, the government plans to use the 2020 Tokyo Olympics to encourage foreign tourists to also visit Japan’s rural ­regions, as a means of revitalizing their local economies.

With Taiwan also facing the problems of an aging population and urban‡rural disparities in development, the Tsai Ing-wen government has turned its attention to rural development, and declared 2019 “year one” for regional revitalization.

In Japan, unused school buildings are being converted into hip new mixed-use spaces. Taiwan could learn from this example. (courtesy of Takeshi C. Y. Lin)

Revitalization vs. redevelopment

Japanese standard-bearers for rural revitalization, such as Ryo Ya­ma­zaki and Hitoshi Ki­no­shita, have developed differing approaches, with the community development school of thought focusing on local identi­ties and community connections, and the commercial school of thought focusing on business development. Each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses.

In Taiwan, the National Development Council is responsible for implementing rural revitalization policy, and has proposed strategies based on a “human-centered approach,” “industries with local DNA,” and “intro­ducing technologies.” “Simply put, if you want people to move back into these areas, you need job opportun­ities for them,” explains NDC minister Chen Mei-ling. “And if you want jobs, you have to have businesses.”

To that end, the NDC is taking stock of local strengths, encouraging business development, and intro­ducing technological infrastructure to meet the needs of the digital age. But is regional revitalization any different than previous community development initi­atives? Setting private-sector development efforts to one side, regional revitalization is clearly different because the government is now explicitly focusing on the use of business creation and economic benefits to energize communities.

Older community development programs focused on unifying communities, forging consensus, and solid­arity, not on fostering local businesses or creating jobs. Simply put, the efforts didn’t emphasize business develop­ment or profit and were typically led by com­mun­ity develop­ment associations. The new revitalization efforts are instead built on a business model and aim to support the scaling-up of local enterprises. “The two paths are different, and do different things,” says Lin.

Even so, both Lin and Chen cite community develop­ment as a first step. As Lin puts it, “Com­mun­ity develop­ment is the foundation that holds people together. But you build on it by starting businesses to create the jobs that enable people to remain in the community.”

Ambition, creativity, cohesion

In 2018, Taiwan’s total fertility rate was among the lowest in the world at just 1.218. Our demographic problem is pressing, but it’s somewhat less visible than Japan’s because our island is more densely populated. “Our promotion of revitalization lags five years behind Japan’s, yet our sense of the crisis is different,” says Lin, pointing to the key problem Taiwan is facing.

In 2014, Lin helped set up “Taiwan Juku,” an agri­cultural exchange program between Mi­ya­zaki Prefecture and Taiwan. This was a rare early example of regional revitalization efforts advanced by Japanese officials, sited in Taiwan and built around intensive exchange. Lin says, “Mi­ya­zaki is comparable to a small township in Hua­lien or Tai­tung, but its local tea farmers were nonetheless willing to come to Taiwan to promote their products.” That willingness shows just how committed the Japanese are to reviving their rural ­communities.

“People in Japan generally only speak Japanese. Plus, Mi­ya­zaki is difficult to get to—it has been called a ‘landlocked desert island.’ If you’re going to increase the number of foreign tourists visiting, you first have to get locals out into the world to broaden their perspect­ive,” says Mao ­Ikeda, president of advertising agency Omi­jika, who helped plan Taiwan Juku.

Perhaps because Japan has now been promoting regional revitalization for some time, it has grown into something of a national movement. In stark contrast to Taiwan, where most of the people paying attention to revitalization are already working in community develop­ment or the cultural and creative industries, in Japan, every­one from manufacturers and insurers to landlords and wealthy local businesspeople is getting involved. And having all these different industries pulling together puts real muscle into turning rural areas around.

National Development Council minister Chen Mei-ling says that it’s important to put people at the center of regional revitalization policies.

Taiwan’s magnetic attraction

The revitalization movement has people at its core. It has not only stirred their pride in their regions, but also forged transnational friendships among the people working on the front lines of its intensive exchanges. The latter have helped build feedback between places, resulting in still greater benefits.

The strength of these connections has come as a complete surprise. Husband and wife Ya­su­masa Endo and Mao ­Ikeda came to Taiwan twice as part of the Taiwan Juku exchange program, and were so drawn to our island that they chose to move here. They have con­tinued to pursue their careers in brand marketing, event planning and writing from their new home, and remain active in Taiwan‡Miyazaki exchanges.

Taiwan Juku may have run its course, but the links it forged between people have proved durable. Built on a foundation of human feeling, they transcend language and ethnicity. Driven by a sense of mission to bring prosperity back to rural regions and a sense that no one was going to do it for them, program participants have achieved a mutual prosperity and wellbeing that exempli­fies regional revitalization in its highest form and enables long-term residents to experience Taiwan’s passion and charm anew.

Husband and wife Yasumasa Endo and Mao Ikeda’s participation in the Taiwan Juku exchange program piqued their curiosity about Taiwan and led to them move here.

courtesy of Omijika

The Omijika group’s Taiwan culture festival in Miyazaki Prefecture highlighted Taiwan’s dynamic culture. (courtesy of Omijika)

The Kaohsiung City Agriculture Bureau’s mascot Kao Tong Tong dances with Miyazaki Prefecture’s “Miyazaki Dogs.” (courtesy of Omijika)