Regional Revitalization 2.0 and the '10 Million Related Population' Target: Are Means and Ends Reversed?

On June 13, 2025, the "Regional Revitalization 2.0 Basic Plan" (Chihousousei 2.0 Kihon Kousou), formulated by the Cabinet Secretariat's New Regional Economy and Living Environment Creation Headquarters, was approved by the Cabinet. Covering FY2025 through FY2034 — a ten-year span — this plan succeeds the "Town, People, and Work Creation Comprehensive Strategy" (Regional Revitalization 1.0, FY2014–2024), marking a new phase in Japan's regional policy.

The plan rests on three pillars. First, creating living environments where young people and women choose to stay. Second, building value-creation-driven local economies. Third, dispersing people and enterprises to regional areas. At the core of this third pillar stands the "Furusato Resident Registration" system (Furusato Juumin Touroku Seido), with a numerical target of 10 million related population (actual persons) over 10 years. The cumulative target is 100 million.

"Related population" (Kankeijinkou) refers to people who engage with a region in diverse ways — neither permanent residents nor mere tourists. According to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT), the current related population is estimated at approximately 22.63 million (roughly 22% of adults aged 18 and over). Of these, about 18.84 million are visit-based and 3.79 million are non-visit-based. The most common type is "hobby and consumption" — essentially people who visit for tourism purposes.

This raises an immediate question: if the broadly defined related population already numbers 22.63 million, why is the Furusato Resident Registration target set at 10 million? This numerical asymmetry goes to the heart of the "definitional ambiguity" problem discussed below.

1.0's decade: What changed, and what didn't

Dimension	1.0 (2014–2024)	2.0 (2025–2034)
Population view	Stop population decline	Adapt to decline as given
Goal metric	Migration/settlement count	Related population & value creation
Women's policy	Supplementary	Core (tackling unconscious bias)
Digital	Catch-up (Digital Garden City)	Technology as central pillar
Best practices	National rollout	Recognizes difficulty of 'universalization'
Outcome	KPI unmet (Tokyo inflow continues)	10M in 10 years (Furusato Registration)

1.0's Self-Acknowledged Failures

• 1.Inter-municipal population competition
• 2.Insufficient focus on youth & women
• 3.Fixated on birth rate, ignored birth count decline
• 4.Outsourcing & lack of local ownership

Question: The paradigm has shifted, but has the competitive logic of 'being chosen' truly changed?

Understanding 2.0 requires examining what 1.0 achieved — and failed to achieve — over its ten-year span.

In December 2014, under the Abe administration, the "Town, People, and Work Creation Comprehensive Strategy" (Machi-Hito-Shigoto Sousei Sougou Senryaku) was approved by the Cabinet. A cumulative budget of approximately ¥1.5 trillion was invested. Towns such as Kamikatsu (Tokushima Prefecture), Kamiyama (Tokushima Prefecture), and Ama (Shimane Prefecture) were promoted nationwide as "success stories."

Yet the Basic Plan for 2.0 itself explicitly lists four points of reflection on 1.0.

First, "child-rearing support and migration promotion became the focus, leading to inter-municipal competition for population." Second, "efforts to create regions that are attractive, workable, and livable for young people and women were insufficient." Third, "regional birth rate comparisons attracted attention, but more focus should have been placed on the sharp decline in the number of births in each area." Fourth, "some local governments outsourced most of their strategy and planning, failing to take ownership and act independently."

The numbers back up these reflections. The most critical KPI of 1.0 — "achieving equilibrium between regional and Tokyo metropolitan area migration flows by FY2027" — is now effectively unattainable. According to the Statistics Bureau, net inflow to the Tokyo metropolitan area (Tokyo, Kanagawa, Chiba, and Saitama) in 2024 was 135,843 persons, an expansion of 9,328 from the previous year. This marks 11 consecutive years of net inflow since the current counting method (including foreign nationals) began in 2014. For Japanese nationals alone, it has been 29 consecutive years.

The exodus of women: Unconscious bias as a new lens

One clear distinction between 2.0 and its predecessor is the centrality of women's policy. The Basic Plan summary includes data showing that roughly half of women who moved to the Tokyo area responded that "in my hometown, there is an assumption that the husband works and the wife stays home."

The 2024 migration data show that net inflow to the Tokyo area among those aged 20–24 was 86,908 (both sexes combined) persons — the largest age cohort. The outflow of young women fundamentally undermines regional reproductive capacity. That 2.0 explicitly addresses unconscious bias (Ankonshasu Baiasu) is a perspective absent from 1.0, and it deserves credit. Whether transforming attitudes can be meaningfully measured as a policy outcome, however, remains unclear.

The definition problem of "related population"

Current Estimate (MLIT Survey)

~22.63M

~22% of adults 18+

Visit-based:~18.84M (18%)Tourism, hobbies, consumption

Non-visit:~3.79M (4%)Furusato tax, online, etc.

Government Target (FY2034)

Furusato Resident Registration

10M (actual persons)

Related Population (cumulative)

100M

Definition Gap

• ▸Broad 'related population' of 22.63M ≠ 10M registered residents
• ▸Even 'hobby/consumption' visitors (2–7 days/year) count
• ▸Does 'registration' create 'relationship,' or vice versa?

The definition of "related population" is foundational to the policy — and remarkably vague.

In the MLIT survey, the most common type is "hobby and consumption," meaning people who visit a region 2–7 days per year. This is nearly indistinguishable from ordinary tourism. The Japan Institute for Local Government has warned that an overly broad definition makes the numbers manipulable.

The Furusato Resident Registration system attempts to make this ambiguous concept visible through smartphone app-based "registration." Premium registration requires a My Number Card (Individual Number Card), and registered users receive benefits such as resident-rate access to public facilities and participation rights in local council meetings. But does registration create a relationship, or does a deepening relationship eventually lead to registration? This causal direction remains undefined, even as the "10 million" figure takes on a life of its own.

The Tokyo Shimbun reported on the "danger of numbers becoming the goal." If 1.0's pursuit of "migration numbers" led to inter-municipal population competition, the question of whether 2.0's pursuit of "registration numbers" is fundamentally different cannot be avoided.

The competition to "be chosen" hasn't ended

2.0 proclaims a paradigm shift to "adapting to population decline as a given." It acknowledges that 1.0's goal of "stopping population decline" was unrealistic given nationwide birth count trends.

However, a paradigm shift in framing is not the same as a structural shift in competition. As long as each municipality aims to "increase its related population," the competition over "which region gets chosen" continues. Related population allows lighter forms of engagement than permanent migration, but since the total pool of engagement is finite (individual time and money are limited), zero-sum competition between municipalities remains unavoidable. The Japan Institute for Local Government identifies the contradiction: "while accepting national population decline as a premise, individual regions still aim to be 'chosen.'"

International comparison: Federalism vs. centralization

International comparison throws the peculiarity of the Japanese approach into sharp relief.

Under Germany's federal system, 16 states (Bundeslaender) hold substantial authority over tax revenue and industrial policy. As the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) describes, the trinity of industrial clusters, Fraunhofer Institutes (applied research), and universities of applied sciences has supported the autonomous development of mid-sized cities. Germany, however, also suffered two consecutive years of negative growth in 2023–2024, meaning the model cannot be unconditionally lauded.

France established DATAR (Delegation for Territorial Planning and Regional Attractiveness) in 1963, pursuing the correction of Paris-centric concentration as a national project spanning more than half a century of gradual decentralization. While France shares Japan's centralized approach, the critical difference is pace: France spent 50 years on gradual devolution, whereas Japan's "Great Heisei Mergers" (1999–2006) compressed municipal consolidation into just a few years.

Japan's Regional Revitalization 2.0 pursues neither the German federal model nor the French gradual devolution model. Instead, it charts a distinctive course: the central government using a digital system (Furusato Resident Registration) to make related population visible. This could be called a "third way," but it also carries a structural tension — attempting to foster regional autonomy while preserving centralized governance.

The "universalization" problem of best practices

The most celebrated success stories from 1.0 — towns like Kamiyama and Ama — depended on specific key persons (charismatic migrant leaders, strong mayoral leadership). Kinoshita Hitoshi's 『地方創生大全』(Chihou Sousei Taizen / The Complete Guide to Regional Revitalization) (Toyo Keizai) critiques how subsidy dependence and consultant outsourcing became the standardized "grammar of regional revitalization," while the genuinely needed mechanisms for autonomous local economies failed to spread.

The 2.0 Basic Plan itself recognizes the difficulty of "universalizing" best practices. Yet as the Japan Research Institute points out, if the root cause of non-universalization is the absence of fiscal guarantee systems, the same problem will recur unless the grant framework itself changes.

Remaining questions

The concept of related population, as discussed in Takahashi Hiroyuki's 『関係人口 都市と地方を同時並行で生きる』(Kankeijinkou: Living in Cities and Regions Simultaneously) (Kobunsha Shinsho) and Tanaka Terumi's 『関係人口をつくる 定住でも交流でもないローカルイノベーション』(Creating Related Population: Local Innovation Beyond Settlement and Exchange) (Kirakusha), holds genuine potential to transcend the urban-rural binary. The problem is that the moment this concept is reduced to a numerical target of "10 million," the risk of means becoming ends materializes.

The greatest lesson from 1.0's decade is that the standard administrative methodology of "setting KPIs and running PDCA cycles" did not function well for the complex challenge of regional revitalization. From an EBPM (Evidence-Based Policy Making) perspective, whether "number of registrants" as a single metric can capture the "quality" of related population or their substantive contribution to regions remains doubtful.

For 2.0 to be genuinely "2.0," it needs structural mechanisms to avoid repeating 1.0's mistakes. The question is not how many register, but how the depth and sustainability of registrants' relationships with regions will be evaluated. The specifics of that institutional design are what matter most.

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• What is EBPM? The Basics of Evidence-Based Policy Making (fundamental framework for evidence-based policy)
• Introduction to Logic Models: Making NPO Outcomes Visible (methods for visualizing policy causal structures)

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