[Feature: The Present State of Regional Migration] Creating "Relationship Populations" Develops Local Human Resources: Building Relationships Outside the Region in Hanamaki City, Iwate Prefecture

Image: Otsugunai Kagura (Hanamaki City)

In response to Japan's population decline problem, triggered by Hiroya Masuda's proposal of "vanishing cities," the government formulated the "Comprehensive Strategy for Town, People, and Job Creation" (hereinafter referred to as the "Comprehensive Strategy") based on the 2014 Act on Overcoming Population Decline and Vitalizing Local Economy. They are promoting migration policies to correct the over-concentration in Tokyo and encourage the return of the population to rural areas.

In line with this movement, prefectures and municipalities across the country have formulated local versions of the Comprehensive Strategy, implementing initiatives such as financial support for migration and settlement, and promoting the attractiveness of local governments.

However, the government summarized the efforts in the "First Phase" from FY2015 to FY2019 by stating, "While the goals were to halt population decline, correct the over-concentration in Tokyo, and ensure growth potential, sufficient results have not been achieved." Consequently, they added a policy for the creation and expansion of "relationship populations" to the Second Phase Comprehensive Strategy starting in FY2020.

According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, a relationship population refers to "people who are neither the 'settled population' who have migrated nor the 'exchange population' who have come for tourism, but who are involved with the region and its people in diverse ways." Furthermore, it is expected that such human resources, particularly young people, are already entering rural areas and will become the bearers of community development.

In Hanamaki City, Iwate Prefecture, where the author works, we have been working to create points of contact to increase the number of people involved with Hanamaki City from outside the region while addressing the problem of population decline.

In this article, I will overview the efforts of Hanamaki City, Iwate Prefecture, to create points of contact with those outside the region, as well as the research on "Commuting Kagura" that I conducted while enrolled in the Master's Program at the Graduate School of Media and Governance. I would like to consider the significance of creating relationship populations from the perspective of "developing local human resources."

Hanamaki City, Iwate Prefecture, is located in the central part of the prefecture and was formed in 2006 through the merger of Hanamaki City, Ohasama Town, Ishidoriya Town, and Towa Town. It is the site of the only airport in the prefecture, has a Tohoku Shinkansen station, and is a key transportation hub for Iwate Prefecture with multiple interchanges on the Tohoku Expressway connecting to the Tokyo metropolitan area. It is also one of the leading hot spring resorts in Tohoku with 12 hot springs, the birthplace of poet and children's story writer Kenji Miyazawa, and a city rich in culture and history where over 100 folk performing arts are preserved.

The total population of Hanamaki City has continued to decline since its peak of 107,175 in 2000, falling to 94,601 in 2020. The population decline is progressing faster than assumed in the Hanamaki City Population Vision formulated in FY2015.

In response to the government's policy for "Town, People, and Job Creation," Hanamaki City formulated the Hanamaki City Comprehensive Strategy for Town, People, and Job Creation in 2015 and began efforts to promote migration and settlement.

Specifically, the city has established support measures such as a vacant house bank system to match vacant houses with potential users, the "Settlement Promotion Housing Acquisition Subsidy" to support costs related to migration from outside the prefecture, and the "Child-rearing Household Housing Acquisition Incentive" to support costs for child-rearing households living near or with parents. Additionally, the city has utilized websites to disseminate information, such as "Iitoko Hanamaki" for migration and settlement information and "Mamafre" for child-rearing support information.

While such projects are being deployed in municipalities nationwide as part of the "Town, People, and Job Creation" trend, Hanamaki City has simultaneously promoted initiatives to create relationships with those outside the region in various fields.

Here, I will introduce two examples of Hanamaki City's efforts to build relationships with those outside the region.

The first is creating points of contact between the community and the Local Revitalization Co-op (hereinafter referred to as "Co-op"), which are human resources who perform regional cooperation activities in various regions under the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.

Hanamaki City is developing recruitment activities that emphasize "clarifying the mission of Co-op members" and "creating opportunities to build relationships with local residents involved in Co-op tasks." Specifically, these include clarifying the mission of Co-op members, holding recruitment briefings in the Tokyo metropolitan area with local residents participating, organizing local tours for prospective applicants, and permitting side jobs related to the mission.

This is intended not only to create an entry point for smoothly entering the community after taking up the post, but also to build cooperative relationships with the community and people involved in the mission during the three-year term of the member.

In 2021, amid the spread of COVID-19, the city held multiple online salons with local residents and Co-op applicants. In these salons, participants discussed how they would utilize Hanamaki City's resources, considered issues with local people, and refined the activities the applicants intended to perform—namely, their missions as Co-op members—to propose them to the local government. This makes it possible to prevent mismatches between the desires of the Co-op members and their actual activities.

Hanamaki City has recruited 18 Local Revitalization Co-op members through these efforts, and the retention rate exceeds 70%, which is higher than the national average. This is thought to be the result of a well-developed system to support relationship building between local residents and Co-op members, making it easier to obtain the cooperation of local residents and thus improving the retention rate.

The second example is the website "Makimaki Hanamaki," where not only citizens but also non-residents who want to be involved with Hanamaki City can report on Hanamaki's content, people, and events that interest them and publish the content as articles.

Launched in 2017, "Makimaki Hanamaki" embodies the idea of involving not only citizens but also people from outside the city to promote the charms of Hanamaki City. On this site, Hanamaki citizens and people who want to be involved with Hanamaki City can report on content they are interested in and act as "citizen writers."

The city held multiple study sessions with professional photographers and writers as instructors to provide opportunities to acquire skills for writing more attractive articles. Additionally, a system for operating the site was created by having Co-op members whose mission is city promotion function as the editorial department.

As a result, "Makimaki Hanamaki" has grown into an information medium where people can learn in detail about life in Hanamaki City and how to enjoy it, and it received the "Good Design Award" in 2019. Even now, five years after its launch, citizen writers continue to post articles, and it continues to function as a mechanism for sustainable involvement with Hanamaki City.

It can be said that Hanamaki City's efforts to build relationships with those outside the region are creating both ways for people from outside the region to get involved with Hanamaki City and ways for local residents to get involved with those outside the region.

Shinichiro Takahashi, a Hanamaki City official who has planned and executed relationship-building projects with those outside the region for six years, states that "such efforts require the development of many human resources."

Mr. Takahashi states that for the activities and retention of Local Revitalization Co-op members, local human resources who can cooperate in fulfilling the mission and mentors who can support the activities of the members after they take up their posts are necessary. Regarding Makimaki Hanamaki, he says that not only writers who post articles are needed, but also human resources to support article creation and those to teach the skills to report and disseminate content of interest. In other words, to create points of contact with the region, it is necessary to simultaneously develop human resources to create those points of contact.

Therefore, as part of the human resource development of city officials to solve local issues, Hanamaki City concluded a partnership agreement with the Keio Research Institute at SFC and established the "Hanamaki City Local Revitalization Institute."

I had the opportunity to participate in the activities of the institute, and while acting as a performer of folk performing arts myself, I conducted research on how to resolve the shortage of performers, which I felt was an issue. I focused on the current situation where it is difficult to sustain the traditional method of securing performers from within the village due to the progress of population decline. I thought that by allowing people who live outside the village and are interested in folk performing arts to participate as performers, and by doing this in tandem with the existing system, it might lead to a solution. I also thought that through the practice of this system, it would become a place for human resource development where the village performers themselves could expand their thinking and methods for securing performers.

Therefore, focusing on "Otsugunai Kagura," one of the representative folk performing arts of Hanamaki City in which I am active as a performer, I enrolled in the Master's Program at the Graduate School of Media and Governance and proceeded with research on the theme of developing a "Commuting Kagura" system to secure "performers from outside the village."

"Commuting Kagura" is a form of folk performing arts transmission activity in which people perform by "commuting" from outside the village where the folk performing arts are passed down.

In folk performing arts, of which there are said to be about 20,000 cases nationwide, the shortage of performers to inherit the art is an issue. Folk performing arts are said to have functions that contribute to the survival of local communities, such as the "village maintenance and regeneration function" (Hashimoto, 2015) and the "function of people returning" (Abe, 2014).

Until now, folk performing arts have been passed down by training children and students in the village who are interested, and securing performers from among those who have the will to continue even after entering society.

However, in the villages where folk performing arts are passed down, the number of children and students living in the village, who are future performer candidates, continues to decrease along with the progress of population decline. Furthermore, the content that children are interested in has diversified, and it is thought that there is a limit to securing performers using only traditional methods.

It is not only those born and raised in the village who are interested in folk performing arts. Previous research has described cases where people who move to villages where folk performing arts are passed down become performers, and efforts where village performers pass on the art to performers from outside the village who are interested.

Based on these cases, I expanded the scope of securing performers not only to those born and raised in the village but also to those living outside the village who are interested in folk performing arts. I developed the "Commuting Kagura Model" as a system that allows "performers from outside the village" to participate in transmission activities together with village performers, and explored the possibility of activities to build the system together with residents from outside the village who commute.

In the research on "Commuting Kagura," I focused on how village performers would evaluate a system in which people participate in kagura transmission activities by "commuting" to the village, even if they do not live in the village or its neighboring districts. Therefore, using Otsugunai Kagura as the field, and with the cooperation of a total of six students attending the Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) of Keio University and researchers from the Keio Research Institute at SFC, activities based on the Commuting Kagura Model were conducted from September to December 2019.

As a result, while village performers welcomed the increase in residents from outside the village involved in kagura, regarding actually working together as performers, opinions were expressed that it is necessary to assess the sustainability of the commuting activities, skills, and personality, on the premise of practicing together.

In other words, while they desire a solution to the problem of performer shortage, for residents from outside the village to continue to be involved as performers, it is desirable for them to be gradually approved while continuing activities with the village performers. On the other hand, a certain level of understanding was also born regarding the intention to secure performers from outside the village, and there were comments positively considering the Commuting Kagura method.

Furthermore, it was found that activities based on the Commuting Kagura Model can function as a system for performers from outside the village to practice in the village, experience performing on occasions approved by village performers, and repeat the cycle of improving their skills through practice, while deepening their relationships with village performers and gaining experience in obtaining the approval of village residents.

In this article, I have overviewed the "multifaceted creation of points of contact" conducted by Hanamaki City, Iwate Prefecture, and the "Commuting Kagura" initiative executed jointly by village residents and the administration.

Hanamaki City's efforts can be described as an initiative that encourages local residents to spontaneously provide points of contact to those outside the region, rather than just promotion where the administration unilaterally disseminates information.

These efforts are likely to be effective in human resource development, as local residents acquire the ability to delve into the things and events they are involved in and open the door for those from outside the region to get involved when attracting human resources from outside the region.

And in the research on "Commuting Kagura," I showed the process of utilizing the resources possessed by the region and building relationships with those outside the region by thinking about methods to open up resources passed down in the region to those outside and build relationships. This case suggests that through the guidance of the art to students and working adults from outside the region, village performers explored various methods and possibilities for continuing transmission activities, which also led to the development of human resources who think about solving the problem of performer shortage.

In other words, working on the creation of relationship populations in rural areas is thought to lead to the development of human resources within the region who solve regional issues while re-recognizing the charm and necessity of the things and events they want to survive in the future within their own scope of involvement, in the process of creating paths for various human resources to enter the region. It can be said that the relationship population is an entity that judges the validity of the strategies and specific initiatives put forward by the developed local residents themselves.

Even with restrictions on movement from urban to rural areas due to the spread of COVID-19, relationship building from rural areas continues through the use of online meeting tools and the holding of small-scale events with countermeasures in place. Continuing these relationship-building efforts and steadily developing human resources who solve regional issues in rural areas is surely necessary for the future sustainability of rural areas.