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The story
The government’s proposed criteria for designating a “secondary capital” call for a city with at least 1.2% of the national population and an economy worth at least 2.1% of GDP — and it turns out Hiroshima Prefecture falls short on the population requirement. Governor Yokota says he plans to ask the national government why these particular criteria were set. The secondary capital concept is meant to provide a backup for capital functions in the event of a major disaster, and on 5ch, opinions split between those arguing that low disaster risk should matter more than population size, and those insisting a certain population and economic scale is needed to keep government functions running — with the debate spreading to candidate cities ranging from Osaka, Nagoya, and Sapporo to Okinawa and Nagano.
The government has published the criteria for designating a “secondary capital” — a city that would take over capital functions in the event of a major disaster — and it has emerged that Hiroshima Prefecture does not meet the population requirement.
Governor Yokota plans to ask the national government why the criteria were set as they are.
Under the draft government ordinance, the criteria for designating a “secondary capital” include having a city that accounts for at least 1.2% of the national population and an economy equivalent to at least 2.1% of GDP.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
it looks deliberately set just high enough to knock Hiroshima out.
Please, no — making a radiation-contaminated area the secondary capital? Hard pass.
If we're going by that logic, Fukushima, Ibaraki, and Chiba would all be out too.
At the very least the ministries and the Diet could move.
Fukushima's Hamadori region would be fine.
Capital relocations based on population often don't work out well — that's been a headache since ancient Japan and every shogunate in history.
Not Fukushima, but before 3/11, Sendai was the leading candidate for a relocated capital.
If Osaka ends up being chosen as the secondary capital, I bet that once the scars of the Tohoku earthquake have healed, the anti-Osaka crowd who aren't happy about it will push to move the capital to Sendai instead, reducing the secondary capital (Osaka, etc.) to a hollow title.
Forcibly moving the capital to a low-population area would just end in failure, like Indonesia.
Realistically, in terms of population, GDP, and global name recognition, it's got to be Osaka.
Exactly this — and cut the number of "senile lawmakers" (a slur pun on *chihō giin*, "local assembly members") down to a tenth.
There are 32,000 of these clowns. 32,000 enemies.
That's exactly what Ishin no Kai (the Osaka-based Japan Innovation Party) is aiming for, but if it were that easy there'd be no struggle.
Even in their home turf of Osaka they couldn't pull it off (the Osaka Metropolis Plan).
Most citizens probably haven't even thought hard about why it matters.
Then it's got to be Osaka, Nagoya, or Sapporo.
Yokohama's too close to Tokyo — in a natural disaster or emergency it would likely go down right along with Tokyo.
In the end this is just a temporary setup until recovery from a Fuji eruption or major earthquake, right?
Kyushu or Hokkaido are too far away — travel back and forth would be a pain.
Why not pick several places like Osaka, Nagoya, and Sendai and just rank them by priority?
Just one feels too risky.
We need somewhere with wide-open land and a food-production base — Sapporo, or Hokkaido in general, can't be left out.
Too close to Tokyo and there's a risk both go down together.
For things like a disaster-recovery computer center, Hokkaido or Kyushu would be preferable.
South Korea, for instance, recently moved its capital from Seoul to some little rural town with nothing there — though Japanese media never reports on it.
The relocation of the capital to Sejong City isn't set to be complete until 2033.
Better to move it to somewhere with a smaller population than an overcrowded area like Osaka.
I get that — if anything, a moderately low-population spot sounds better.
It's not like there's a ton of open land there either.
It's got an airport nearby, and unlike central Hiroshima it's not saturated with development, so there's plenty of room to build new facilities.
And best of all, it sits up on a plateau, so tsunami damage simply isn't possible.
That's way too low a population though — the infrastructure's there, but it's actually Hiroshima itself that has open land up around the north side of the station.
Does population even matter for maintaining the national government's administrative functions in the first place?
It's not like you're building a factory — you don't need that many people.
The secondary capital is meant to eventually become a regional capital — the question is whether Hiroshima's tax revenue could actually maintain the roads and bridges of Shikoku and the San'in region.
The current capital has such a huge population that the bureaucrats probably just don't want to be stuck somewhere rural.
Also, hardly anyone online pushes for Kyoto, yet the Kyoto Prefectural Assembly basically went out of its way to announce "we're not running" — self-own PR, lol.
Realistically it'd have to be somewhere in the Pacific coastal belt.
The whole point is to place the secondary capital somewhere free from the risk of a Tokyo-area earthquake or a Mt. Fuji eruption — so all of Kanto, plus Yamanashi and Shizuoka, are out of the question from the start.
And a Nankai earthquake would hit the Pacific coastal belt hard too.
Nagano or Yamanashi would be a three-hour trip each way.
If convenience is the priority, northern Kanto would work fine — places like Gunma or the Nasu area wouldn't get hit by a massive quake at the same time as central Tokyo.
I don't really get the point of northern Kanto — it's too rural.
Apparently during the Great Kanto Earthquake, the municipalities surrounding Kanto were completely overwhelmed just dealing with refugees from the disaster zone.
The population's only grown since then, so wouldn't disaster response need to take priority over serving as a capital-function backup?
Also, if Mt. Fuji erupts, depending on wind direction the affected area could be pretty severe.
Background and key points of this discussion
The government’s proposed criteria for designating a “secondary capital” set numerical thresholds — at least 1.2% of the national population and at least 2.1% of GDP — reflecting a plan to designate, in advance, a backup location to take over if a Nankai Trough or Tokyo-area earthquake knocks out central government functions. Hiroshima Prefecture falls short of the population requirement, and Governor Yokota plans to ask the national government to explain the basis for the criteria themselves. What split the thread was disagreement with the underlying premise that a large population is even necessary — one camp argued that a less-populated area would actually be easier to build new government facilities in and carries lower disaster risk, while the other insisted a certain economic base is needed to support national administrative functions. Candidates ranged from major metro areas like Osaka, Nagoya, and Sapporo to Hiroshima, Higashi-Hiroshima, Okinawa, and Nagano — and readers may easily conflate this with an outright capital relocation, when the distinction (a disaster-time backup rather than a permanent move) wasn’t always made clear in the discussion. Comparisons were drawn to South Korea’s relocation to Sejong City, but details like the completion date were just one poster’s claim in the thread, not verified information.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Soku+) thread “Secondary Capital Plan: Hiroshima Misses the Population Cut, Governor Yokota to Press Tokyo for Answers“.
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