The Fragility of 'One Million Furusato Residents': Can Numerical Targets Qualify as EBPM?

On June 13, 2025, the Cabinet Secretariat, New Regional Economy and Living Environment Creation Headquarters adopted the Regional Revitalization 2.0 Basic Concept by Cabinet decision. The Basic Concept places the Furusato Resident Registration system at its core and explicitly states a numerical goal of one million actual persons in ten years, with 100 million cumulative engagements, as the related-population creation target. The Furusato Resident Registration system allows residents to apply via a smartphone app to register with municipalities other than their place of residence to which they have a continuing connection, whereupon the municipality issues a registration certificate. MIC began soliciting model-project municipalities in March 2026.

The subject of this article is the figure "one million" itself. The direction and overall picture of Regional Revitalization 2.0 are addressed in the companion column "Structural Analysis of Regional Revitalization 2.0 and the One Million Related-Population Target". This article approaches the same theme from a different angle — critiquing whether the numerical target in the first place satisfies the requirements of EBPM (evidence-based policymaking).

Tracing the basis for the figure reveals a peculiar fact. The figure of one million appears in the main text, the summary, and the policy collection of the Basic Concept — but nowhere in any of these documents is the calculation basis stated. A review of the publicly available minutes of the "New Regional Economy and Living Environment Creation Council" (chaired by Hiroya Masuda), which deliberated the Basic Concept, reveals that the assumption of "100 million cumulative engagements = one million actual persons × average ten municipalities per person" is noted — but no calculation process showing why the actual figure is one million can be confirmed. The first media report was in the Nikkei, May 31, 2025 — a draft report in which "one million in ten years" already appeared — and the deliberative process also remains unclear.

The absence of the basis from public documents is not, in itself, necessarily a policy defect. But placing alongside it another figure — what might be called the "broadly defined related population" — makes the contours of the problem visible. The MLIT "Survey on Connections with Regions" 2024 estimate places the related population at approximately 22.63 million — about 22% of adults aged 18 and over. Of this, approximately 18.84 million are visit-based and approximately 3.79 million non-visit-based; the largest category is "hobby and consumption type," i.e., people who visit as tourists.

MLIT's broadly defined estimate of 22.63 million is a figure based on self-reported surveys capturing the actual state of existing relationships; the government's target of one million measures the related population through the institutional proxy of the Furusato Resident Registration system. The two derive from different population bases and are not directly comparable. Yet the Basic Concept's main text, summary, and policy collection contain no explanation of this divergence. The necessity of newly creating one million registrations when there are already 22.63 million broadly defined related-population members, and the hypothesis that registration numbers correlate with the actual state of relationships, appear nowhere in the policy documents.

The Absence of a Comprehensive Evaluation of Regional Revitalization 1.0

Before questioning the validity of the numerical target, it is necessary to ascertain what actually happened during Regional Revitalization 1.0. From the first comprehensive strategy, adopted by Cabinet in December 2014 under the Act for the Creation of a Society with a Decreasing Birthrate and Vitalizing Local Economy, through the Second Comprehensive Strategy (FY2020–2024), a cumulative total of approximately 1.5 trillion yen in funding was invested over ten years.

The most critical KPI over those ten years was "equalization of net migration into and out of the Tokyo Metropolitan Area." The original target year was 2020, but following its impossibility, the deadline was extended to FY2027. And in 2024 — just ahead of FY2027 — the net inflow to the Tokyo Metropolitan Area was 135,843 persons, expanding by 9,328 from the prior year. That marks the eleventh consecutive year of net inflow since the 2014 commencement of the survey including foreign nationals, and the twenty-ninth consecutive year for Japanese nationals only — a continuous concentration of population in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area. The most critical KPI remains structurally unmet, and the 2.0 era has begun.

The Regional Revitalization 2.0 Basic Concept explicitly notes four lessons from 1.0. First, "support for childcare and migration promotion became central, leading to competition for population among municipalities." Second, "insufficient efforts were made to create regions that are attractive, easy to work in, and easy to live in for young people and women." Third, "regional comparisons of birth rates attracted attention, but insufficient focus was placed on the large decrease in the number of births in each region." Fourth, "there were cases in which local governments outsourced most of their strategy and planning to external parties, failing to engage with genuine ownership."

What matters here is that these lessons amount to a "list" without structural analysis of why they occurred. Mitsuo Fujiyama of the Japan Research Institute explicitly noted that "the government has not conducted a comprehensive evaluation of Regional Revitalization 1.0" and that "the lessons presented in the Basic Concept amount to a list of failures without structural analysis of why the policies did not work." SOMPO Institute Plus, in an August 2024 report, summarized that "each municipality had been aiming for population growth, but the results have been limited to 'social increase,' constituting a 'competition to steal population.'" In the case of Hokkaido, municipalities other than Sapporo experienced a net outflow of more than 10,000 people to Sapporo, while net outflows to the Tokyo Metropolitan Area were approximately 3,000 — a geographically driven phenomenon, unrelated to policy effects, in which intra-regional migration dwarfed the outflow to Tokyo.

KPI management itself also has operational problems. According to a National Diet Library survey, a 2019 government review rated two of the four basic goals of 1.0 — ① job creation in regions and ④ safety and community ties in daily life — as "progressing generally on track toward targets," while ② new population flows to regions and ③ realizing the hopes of young generations were assessed as "having KPIs with insufficient effectiveness." On the municipal side, KPI operation has not stabilized either. A Research Institute of Local Government article notes that the first-period strategy KPIs had been hierarchically organized under basic goals ①–④, but that the second-period strategy substantially revised these into a more concentrated set — "the share of people who feel society is moving toward warmth for marriage, pregnancy, children, and child-rearing" and "balance of inflows and outflows between Tokyo area and the rest of Japan." Civic media have pointed to phenomena such as targets rotating through "tourist numbers → number of vacant-house utilization cases → number of migrants" as achievement rates fluctuate, and the gap between initial KPI design and actual outcomes has been a persistent issue throughout 1.0.

The Definition Problem of "Related Population" and the Population Base for One Million

The concept of related population itself began with Noriomi Odagiri (Meiji University) defining it as "people who engage continuously and in diverse ways with a specific region," and was popularized by Terumi Tanaka's book 『関係人口をつくるー定住でも交流でもないローカルイノベーション』 (Creating Related Populations: Local Innovation Beyond Settlement and Tourism) (Kirakusha, 2017). MIC defines the related population as "those who engage diversely with regions and their people, and are neither the settled population who have migrated there nor the visitor population who have come as tourists," with various gradations of relationship intensity and continuity assumed.

Here is where the definitional range becomes a problem. Broadly construed, the related population can include a very wide range: those who follow regional accounts on social media, donors to furusato nōzei (hometown tax), those who visit multiple times as tourists, dual residents, and former community cooperation volunteers. Narrowly construed, it is limited to those who participate in some form in regional social decision-making or economic activity while maintaining personal relationships with regional residents. MLIT's 22.63 million is closer to the former; the government's target of one million is an attempt to make the latter institutionally visible.

What this table makes visible is that three figures are grouped under the same phrase "related population," yet their character is entirely different. The conflation of actual-state indicators and institutional indicators creates a structure in which reporting "actual persons reaches one million" makes it appear that "related-population policy has succeeded" — embedding the risk that an increase in registrations is conflated with a qualitative expansion of relationships.

What Is Happening on the Municipal Side: The GLOCOM Survey of 473 Municipalities

Another perspective for assessing the validity of numerical targets is the perception on the municipal side that will be implementing the policy. International University of Japan GLOCOM's Masato Ito conducted a nationwide municipal survey in July 2025 that is instructive on this point. The survey targeted 473 of the 1,741 municipalities (response rate 32.2%) and asked for evaluations of the Furusato Resident Registration system; the results were as follows.

While favorable responses are the majority, the scale of 145 opposing municipalities cannot be dismissed. According to GLOCOM's analysis, the concerns of opponents fall into five categories. First, "requests regarding system design and operations" (insufficient explanation, administrative burden, lack of flexibility). Second, "insufficient funding and incentives." Third, "intensification of regional competition and inequality" (concentration of registrations in urban areas and popular municipalities). Fourth, "opinions on the system itself" ("it seems likely to become formalistic," "the effort is not worth the benefit"). Fifth, "requests for explanation and support from the government."

Also noteworthy: of the 310 municipalities that had already implemented related-population promotion initiatives, only 15 reported feeling positively about the outcomes of their initiatives, while 110 reported "neutral or reserved" views. The structure in which a target of one million registrations is institutionally overlaid on a situation where even existing related-population initiatives are generating little sense of outcome is worth noting.

The most explicit articulation of structural criticism from the municipal side came from Shimane Governor Tatsuya Maruyama. At his regular press conference on June 11, 2025, Governor Maruyama said: "When we are told something like a fairy tale that is far removed from what we are trying to solve"; "if the related population does not lead to a settled population, it has no meaning for us"; "I find it incomprehensible to be chasing a fuzzy population that drifts like a loose breeze"; "what we face is how to address the decline in the number of people who live and work here, and the reduction in ferry routes to remote islands and bus lines"; and "it is not anger but grief that I feel." These are remarkable words — a direct expression by the governor of a prefecture with hilly and remote areas and remote islands of the gap between policy design and ground-level reality.

As argued in the companion column "The Organizational Decline of Local Government Workers", the very workforce that handles administrative operations in regional areas is contracting. The question of whether the capacity on the municipal side to process one million registrations and implement connections with regions is consistent with the scale of the target is also not addressed head-on in the Basic Concept.

EBPM and KPI Management Are Structurally Different

The problems identified thus far may appear to be technical shortcomings in KPI design. But as the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) has clarified, the problem runs deeper. RIETI's column distinguishes EBPM and KPI management as structurally different practices.

KPI is a mechanism for capturing progress and outcomes in a policy in simplified form: set target values in advance, and measure the degree of achievement afterward. EBPM is a practice of elucidating the causal relationship between policy and outcomes. The decisive distinction between the two is the counterfactual (counterfactual) question: "how would this indicator have evolved had the policy not existed?" EBPM identifies the effect specific to the policy by comparing a group that implemented the policy with one that did not, or by comparing before and after the policy under conditions where other variables are held constant.

Applying this distinction to the one-million target makes the structural gap visible. First, the absence of a counterfactual. There is no projection of how the related population would have evolved had the Furusato Resident Registration system not existed. Given that MLIT's broadly defined estimate already stands at 22.63 million, the related population would fluctuate due to natural growth, expansion of touchpoints via social media, recovery of tourism demand, and other factors even without the registration system. There is no design to distinguish whether, after introducing the registration system, an increase in registrations represents policy impact or merely capturing natural growth within an institutional framework.

Second, the absence of a control group. The Furusato Resident Registration system is expected to proceed from a model project toward national rollout in stages — but no randomization across municipalities or phased introduction design (comparing early-adoption and late-adoption groups) is anticipated. Without this, it is impossible to disentangle whether regional differences in registration numbers reflect policy impact or differences in regional attributes (tourism resources, name recognition, proximity to metropolitan areas, etc.).

Third, the conflation of the act of registration with the actual state of the relationship. Registration is "a declaration of intent to have a relationship" — it is not "the actual state of a relationship." A practitioner in Hino Town, Tottori Prefecture, which introduced the Furusato Resident Registration system in 2016 and has accumulated approximately 780 registrations over about ten years, said: "There are differences in passion even among registrants. To measure outcomes, you have to look at increases in visitors to the town." The ground-level sense from a pioneering municipality suggests that the number of registrants is a rough indicator for capturing the actual state of the related population. Koso Nippon noted in the same Tokyo Shimbun article that "a mechanism must be created to enable two-way interaction, and a triangular relationship must be built involving local residents as well," pointing to the limits of the one-directional institutional design of registration.

Dependence on "Success-Story Collections" and the Absence of Failure Cases

The gap in EBPM design also casts a shadow on the policy-learning cycle. What Regional Revitalization 1.0 produced in quantity were "success cases" such as Kamikatsu Town (Tokushima), Kamiyama Town (Tokushima), Ama Town (Shimane), Niseko Town (Hokkaido), and Ohnan Town (Shimane). The Cabinet Secretariat disseminated these nationwide as "regional revitalization case collections" and "regional revitalization best practices," and municipalities referenced them as models.

The problem is the absence of failure case collections. Civic media have attributed the structural absence of recorded failures in regional revitalization to three factors: political risk aversion (recorded failures directly invite Diet scrutiny), selective media reporting, and the obfuscation of administrative documents (through language such as "room for improvement"). Representative examples of "regional revitalization that could not be withdrawn" include the Auga facility in Aomori City (18.5 billion yen invested; cumulative losses exceeding 2.4 billion yen), the Fully Ripened Farm in Minami-Alps City (800 million yen invested; withdrawn within one year), and the cluster of tourism facilities in Yubari City (35 billion yen invested; visitors fell from 1.6 million to 300,000). These were reported as individual incidents but were never systematized as policy learning.

In the process of universalizing the "Kamikatsu model" and the "Ama Town model," the geographical and historical specificity of each region, personal networks, and elements of chance were abstracted away. In 2.0, the focus is again on case examples from pioneering municipalities that have already operated the Furusato Resident Registration system (such as Hino Town, Tottori Prefecture). The structure in which only selected success cases are universalized while recorded institutional failures do not remain is the same in 1.0 and 2.0. The convergence from the four basic goals of 1.0 — which proved difficult to achieve — to a single core KPI of furusato resident registration in 2.0 can also be read as a design that prioritized "measurability." But a measurable indicator is not necessarily the right indicator to measure.

"Numerical-Target-Type Regional Policy" Viewed Through International Comparison

Because no policy concept directly corresponding to "related population" exists in other countries, a comparison on the meta-level of "central government designing regional policy with a ten-year, nationwide, uniform numerical target" is useful. Drawing on comparison materials from the Council of Local Authorities for International Relations (CLAIR) and MIC's comparative materials on systems in Japan and other countries, an overview follows.

The United Kingdom institutionalized community asset transfer rights and service delivery challenge rights under the 2011 Localism Act (Localism Act). The centerpiece of regional policy is devolution of authority to communities, not numerical targets set by the central government. France has advanced devolution through a three-tier structure of communes, departments, and regions since the 1982 Decentralisation Act (Loi de décentralisation). The tradition of centralization is strong, but the institutional design for geographical anchoring differs from Japan's — for instance, the clawback period for inheritance and gift taxation is fifteen years.

What the two countries have in common is that the core of regional policy lies in "redesigning the locus of authority" — not in nationwide, uniform numerical targets of the kind "the central government, in ten years, one million." Japan's Furusato Resident Registration is a model in which the central government designs a nationwide, uniform institution with a ten-year, one-million-person numerical target and has municipalities implement it — a design that is, internationally speaking, rather anomalous. Comparative analysis raises the questions: "Who designs the system?" and "Who provides the basis for the target?"

As argued in the companion column "The Structure of Kyoto City's Vacant House Tax", the case of Kyoto City is a contrasting example of an attempt by the municipal side to design its own revenue and institutional framework. Whether a top-down model in which the central government sets numerical targets and has municipalities implement them, or a bottom-up model in which municipalities develop institutions in response to region-specific challenges, is better suited to the purpose of "increasing the related population" is a question that should, in principle, be empirically verified.

Can Numerical Targets Qualify as EBPM?

Based on the analysis to this point, the "one million furusato residents" target has the following characteristics: the calculation basis is not stated in public documents; it was set in the absence of a comprehensive evaluation of Regional Revitalization 1.0; the proxy indicator of registration numbers is conflated with the actual state of the relationship; it lacks a counterfactual and control-group design; structural criticism from the municipal side has emerged (Shimane Governor Maruyama's "fairy tale," 145 opposing municipalities in the GLOCOM survey); and the structure of dependence on success-story collections from 1.0 is being replicated.

These are not criticisms of "setting numerical targets" per se. Numerical targets can be useful as expressions of policy intent in some circumstances. The issue is whether the cycle of target-setting → intervention design → evaluation → learning is functioning in related-population policy. The Administrative Reform Promotion Headquarters' EBPM Guidebook called for "departing from the myth of administrative infallibility" and advocated an EBPM culture that tolerates policy failure. But the absence of a comprehensive evaluation of 1.0 and the absence of a basis for the numerical target in 2.0 show that the ideals of the guidebook have not functioned in the domain of regional revitalization.

Ten years from now, whether registrations exceed one million is probably not the important question. What matters is whether, during those ten years, a mechanism for verifying "whether registration growth correlates with the actual state of the related population," "what changed compared to a scenario without the Furusato Resident Registration system," and "if policy effectiveness differences emerged across municipalities, what explains those differences" is built into the design from the outset. The MIC Verification Report on the Related Population Creation and Expansion Project evaluated 74 model projects from FY2018 and FY2019 as of 2021, but the methodology for translating the effect of each project into regional economic impact had not been established. Methods prone to arbitrariness — such as economic ripple effects — were commonly used, and no rigorous evaluation incorporating counterfactuals had been achieved.

"One million furusato residents" is a numerical target set before the review of Regional Revitalization 1.0 was complete. It contains the risk of carrying over from 1.0 the structure of "related population inflation" (inflation in numbers) and "dependence on success-story collections," and if the decade passes as-is, there is a real possibility of arriving at a Regional Revitalization 3.0 Basic Concept in 2034 that once again "lists failures without structural analysis." The question of whether numerical targets can qualify as EBPM is not only a question about related-population policy — it is a question about Japanese public policy evaluation as a whole.

Related Articles

References

Reference Books

• 『関係人口をつくるー定住でも交流でもないローカルイノベーション』 (Creating Related Populations: Local Innovation Beyond Settlement and Tourism) (Terumi Tanaka, Kirakusha, 2017): The defining work that popularized the concept of related population. Positioned the related population as a third category — "neither settlement nor tourism" — and built it on fieldwork from Shimane Prefecture. A useful starting point for understanding the conceptual design prior to the "numerical targeting" critiqued in this article

For those interested in EBPM-aligned policy design and evidence-based program development, the following guides are recommended.

• What Is EBPM? Foundations of Evidence-Based Policymaking: Explains counterfactual reasoning, intervention definition, and outcome measurement
• Logic Model Guide: A Practical Framework for NPOs and Government Programs: Covers KPI-setting and causal hypothesis visualization at a practical level