Local governments at risk of disappearing Governor Oigawa emphasizes the need for bold national policies | NHK Ibaraki Prefecture News

Governor Oigawa of Ibaraki Prefecture told reporters on the 26th that a group of private experts analyzed the rate of decline in young women and announced that 17 municipalities in Ibaraki Prefecture “may eventually disappear.” At the press conference, he stated that the country needs to implement bold population reduction policies, saying, “The country needs to take measures based on an idea that would be considered “unreasonable”.”

The Population Strategy Council, a group of experts, analyzed the decline rate of women in their 20s and 30s and announced that 17 municipalities in the prefecture, including Hitachi City, are “municipalities at risk of disappearing” whose populations will rapidly decline and eventually disappear. Did.
Furthermore, Tsukubamirai City is the only “independent and sustainable municipality” in the prefecture that “even after 100 years, nearly 50% of the population will be young women, so it is considered highly sustainable”.
Regarding this, Governor Oigawa of Ibaraki Prefecture stated at a regular press conference on the 26th, “There is no change in the fact that areas that are not classified as municipalities at risk of extinction are still predicted to continue to experience population decline. There are only a few of them in the country, so Japan is on the verge of becoming a country at risk of extinction,” he said, expressing a sense of crisis that population decline is a major issue for the entire country.
He emphasized that Ibaraki Prefecture has placed population decline countermeasures at the center of its policies, and added, “The efforts of local governments alone cannot fundamentally change the situation. “We need to take measures to reduce the population,” he said, adding that the country needs to implement bold population reduction policies.
There have been various reactions to this announcement, with Kasama City Mayor Nobuki Yamaguchi expressing a sense of crisis and publishing an opinion paper calling for a review of the phrase “municipalities at risk of disappearing.” It will be interesting to see if the discussion becomes lively.