Urban Food Deserts in Japan

Exploring the impact of depopulation on a country's population geography: Lessons learned from Japan

“…This partly reflects an increasing interest in various contextual effects at work on death risks and health inequalities, including social capital, walkability, local food environment, and smoking (e.g., Hanibuchi et al, 2011Hanibuchi et al, , 2012aHanibuchi et al, , 2012bHanibuchi et al, , 2015. The food desert problem, particularly for the elderly in relation to population ageing, can be considered the result of reduced social capital, as demonstrated in Iwama et al (2021). Some recent works have conducted multi-level analysis combining aggregated data and microdata.…”

“…One of them is the food desert problem, which means that older residents' access to affordable food providers is highly restricted due to the biased distribution of commercial facilities like convenience stores and supermarkets. In Japan, the food desert problem is mainly regarded as a part of the ageing problem in depopulated suburbs, small cities, and rural areas, since such commercial facilities have been reduced and the public transportation network has been weakened in most of those areas (Iwama et al, 2021). In contrast, in Europe and the United States, such a problem became apparent earlier than in Japan, and it tended to be regarded as part of a social problem attributed to the low‐income group, mainly in the inner city (Swinburn et al, 2004; Wrigley et al, 2003).…”

How Are Tier 2 Metropolises Affected by Housing Asset Value Deflation in the Depopulation Era? A Comparison between the Tokyo and Kansai Metropolitan Areas

“…The latter registered a rise in the day-to-night population ratios because employment, especially in the service sector and within the Tokyo region, did not relocate significantly to "edge cities" in spite of plans facilitating office dispersion [15,30]. Meanwhile, hollowing-out became visible in the cores of mid-size cities and capitals of non-metropolitan prefectures [14,20].…”

“…However, one limitation of existing the literature concerns its geographical scope: the intensity of shrinkage and its impacts on the housing sector vary considerably from one locality to another [13][14][15], but Japanese regions have not received equal attention. Indeed, most studies that have categorized the factors leading to different trajectories of decline [16][17][18] or analyzed the impacts of shrinkage on the built environment and real estate markets [19][20][21][22][23] base their fieldwork upon cases situated either in Tokyo or a non-metropolitan municipality. Metropolitan-level studies centered on cities as big as Osaka and Nagoya are absent from this stream of investigations.…”