Creating Larger Regional Administrative Units

Here I want to draw attention to the merits of introducing a system of large, highly autonomous regional administrative units. I envision a federation of about 10 subnational jurisdictions, each with nearly as much autonomy as an independent nation. It is worth pointing out that the size of Japan (approx. 370,000km²) is smaller than that of California (420,000 km²). Whereas a single governor is in charge of California’s administration, however, Japan has a separate governor for each of its 47 prefectures. Granted, Japan is about four times larger than California in terms of economic scale and population, but surely it does not need as many as 47 governors.

Japan is divided into a large number of prefectures simply because when the modern administrative apparatus was put into place, the prefectural system was modeled on the traditional feudal domains. There had been almost 300 domains, but the Meiji government decided that that was too many. Back then people traveled between Tokyo and Osaka by foot, and it took even express messengers 14 days to cover the distance. In what was a bold reform at the time, the government cut the number of subnational jurisdictions to some 70 prefectures in 1871, and then to 47 prefectures not long thereafter. However, information tools have greatly advanced since that time, and now it takes less than three hours to travel from Tokyo to Osaka by the Shinkansen bullet train. Continued use of an administrative setup created more than a century ago has become incongruous.

As is clear from Figure 2, each of the proposed regional blocs would have ample economic strength to allow for regional autonomy. For example, the economic strength of the Kansai bloc would be roughly on par with the ¥90 trillion output of South Korea, that of the Chūgoku bloc would be comparable to the ¥72 trillion level of the Netherlands, and the economy of the Kyūshū bloc would be larger than the ¥29 trillion economy of Denmark (all figures are taken from the OECD Annual National Accounts Database and converted into yen based on an exchange rate of $1 = ¥113.26).