A Missed Opportunity in the COVID Crisis — The Problem of Depopulation
The COVID-19 pandemic, which was first confirmed in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, in late 2019, rapidly spread across the globe. In Japan as well, infections increased sharply from the spring of 2020 onward, and the government struggled to respond. However, rather than presenting any fundamental long-term solutions, it mostly relied on temporary measures.
Eventually, the virus evolved into variants with lower severity, society gradually entered a mood of “post-pandemic recovery,” and in the end, many aspects of daily life simply returned to the way they had been before.
Yet perhaps the COVID crisis was also a major opportunity to reconsider another serious issue facing Japanese society.
The Remaining Problem of Urban Concentration
Infectious diseases spread more easily in densely populated areas. During the pandemic, the government promoted measures such as staying at home and remote work in order to reduce direct human contact. As infection-control policies, these measures were not wrong.
At the same time, however, Japan has long struggled with excessive population concentration in the Tokyo metropolitan area and the continuing depopulation of rural regions. What if the COVID crisis had been used as an opportunity to rethink this population structure itself?
A Different Perspective
The basic principle of infection control is to reduce opportunities for human-to-human transmission. But in large cities, where population density is extremely high, maintaining physical distance is inherently difficult.
In contrast, rural and sparsely populated areas naturally allow greater distance between people, making large-scale transmission less likely. From this perspective, reducing overcrowding in major cities and redistributing population toward rural regions could itself have functioned as a form of infection-control policy.
For example, the government could have introduced major tax incentives or subsidies for companies relocating to depopulated regions. Such policies might have encouraged businesses to move into rural areas, which in turn could have promoted migration from cities to the countryside. In addition, improving remote-work infrastructure in regional areas might have reduced the need for workers to remain concentrated in major urban centers.
As a result, Japan might have been able to address several problems simultaneously:
- reducing population density in large cities,
- lowering the risk of infectious disease transmission,
- revitalizing regional economies,
- and increasing local tax revenues in rural communities.
A Crisis That Was Not Fully Utilized
COVID-19 was undoubtedly a tragic event. But at the same time, it may also have been an opportunity to reconsider the structure of Japanese society itself.
The idea of linking infection-control measures with the problem of regional depopulation — in other words, creating a more geographically distributed society — was not necessarily unrealistic. That such discussions never became a major national debate, and that society simply returned to its previous state, remains somewhat regrettable.
