Municipality (Japan)

Administrative division of Japan 2014 (prefectures and sub-prefectures in Hokkaidō red, municipalities black, districts of designated cities gray)

In Japan today there are four types of parishes , which are self-governing local authorities below the prefectural level . Japan is actually divided into prefectures and parishes across the board, each point in Japan should therefore belong to exactly one parish and exactly one prefecture and there should be no unincorporated areas ; however, the municipality affiliation of some areas, particularly remote islands, virgin land areas and bodies of water, is controversial.

The four types of churches are:

Shi ( 市 ), (district-free) cities, of which the largest as seirei shitei toshi (such as "government-designed cities") otherwise take over the administrative tasks due to the prefectures and divided into districts ( ku , sometimes more clearly 行政区 , gyōsei-ku , "administrative districts") are, other larger cities are classified in descending order of administrative competence as "core cities" ( chūkakushi ) and "special cities" ( tokureishi ),

Machi ( 町 , Sino-Japanese reading chō ), (usually: district) cities, whereby the districts, Gun , essentially only exist as a geographical name,

Mura ( 村 , Sino-Japanese son ), (district) villages and

[Tokubetsu-] Ku ( [特別] 区 ), "[special] districts", which so far only exist in Tokyo; not to be confused with the aforementioned administrative districts of large cities. But both are often only named as ku , "district [e]".

Some communities on remote islands are machi or mura , but do not belong to a county.

Because the districts of Tokyo have been subject to certain restrictions since 2000, which have been limited to a few areas of responsibility and the tax system compared to other municipalities, they are still not counted among the municipalities in some contexts. B. at the central government in municipal statistics (see below) of the Sōmushō responsible for relations with the local authorities not at all or only separately. In other contexts, for example in the election of their mayors and parliaments, the districts are on the other hand today. B. also treated equally in the election statistics (see below) of the Sōmushō responsible for elections at the central government.

As of January 4, 2012, including Tokyo, there were a total of 1,742 parishes, of which 787 shi , 748 machi / chō , 184 mura / son and 23 tokubetsu-ku . Due to the large number of incorporations, Machi and Mura have greatly decreased in number. Many urban areas of cities that were “newly” created in the Heisei years are almost identical to those of the former rural districts.

Collective terms and translations

Together the congregations are usually referred to as shi-ku-chō-son ( 市区町村 ), sometimes also as shi-chō-son-ku ( 市町村区 ), when the words for the four types of congregation are contracted together. In Tokyo Prefecture, where the majority of residents live in the districts, the term ku-shi-chō-son ( 区市町村 ) is also found , especially in official contexts . Outside of Tokyo Prefecture or nationwide, the older term shi-chō-son ( 市町村 ) is also common, which, depending on the context, can mean all four forms. The term kiso jichitai ( 基礎自治体 ), with which one generally, z. B. can also designate the lower level of local authorities in other countries, today refers to all four forms, but is also not historically clear, because the districts of Tokyo were not always included.

The word chihō kōkyō dantai ( 地方公共団体 ) used in the self-government law denotes as a generic term all bodies regulated there, i.e. prefectures, all four types of municipalities, different types of prefecture and municipality associations, zaisan-ku ("property districts"), which partly on premodern tradition managing declining communal property of part of a community (territorial reform of 1888/89) such as forests, pasture land, fishing rights, onsen etc., and chihō kaihatsu jigyōdan (regional development companies, now abolished) together; chihō jichitai ( 地方自治体 ) or just jichitai ( 自治体 ) are often used synonymously. Some of these terms are translated as "regional authority [s]", but in the narrower sense, depending on the context, these are only prefectures and municipalities, with or without the districts of Tokyo.

Depending on the context, the lowest administrative level of Japan in its entirety, i.e. H. all shi, machi, mura and tokubetsu-ku together, referred to as "the communities" or, if the context does not include the tokubetsu-ku per se as one of the communities, as "the communities and districts of Tokyo" or similar.

In this article, unless expressly stated otherwise, the term “the municipalities” refers to all four of the above-mentioned forms of local authority which together subdivide the country and all of its 47 prefectures with the exception of the aforementioned restriction for disputed areas.

Municipal Code

Today's legal bases for the organization of communities are primarily the post-war constitution and the chihō-jichi-hō ("Law on Local Self-Government") from 1947. The latter distinguishes the shi , machi and mura together with the prefectures as futsū chihō kōkyō dantai ( 普通地方公共団体 , “normal” or “ordinary local authorities”) from the tokubetsu chihō kōkyō dantai ( 特別地方公共団体 , “special ~”), which include the districts of Tokyo in addition to the above-mentioned special-purpose associations and property districts.

Institutions

In the municipalities, as in the prefectures, a presidential system is practiced, that is, the mayor ( shi- / ku- / chō- / son-chō ) is elected every four years by simple majority voting directly by the people, i.e. independently of the local parliaments ( shi - / ku- / chō- / son-gikai , in some large cities still under the older name shikai ). These are elected by non-transferable individual votes; the number of members depends on the size of the population; Most of the municipalities form “large constituencies”, so the municipality as a whole forms a single constituency, in the seirei shitei toshi each municipality forms a constituency. Citizens can force new elections for mayors, local parliaments or individual members of parliament through a successful recall . The local parliament can pass a vote of no confidence in the mayor , to which the mayor must react by resigning or dissolving parliament. In addition, Parliament can dissolve itself.

An accumulation of offices or mandates at different levels, such as B. was traditionally widespread in France, is generally not possible in Japan today: mayors may not belong to a municipal, prefectural parliament or a chamber of the national parliament, and municipal representatives may not be representatives at the prefectural or national level at the same time,

Basically analogous to the prefecture level, the local parliament jōrei ( 条例 , see statutes in public law in Germany ) decides on the budget, monitors the mayor and the municipal administration and elects the members of the municipality's electoral supervision commission. The mayor heads the municipal administration, appoints no, one or more vice mayors ( fuku-shi- / ku- / chō- / son-chō , in many places also joyaku ) and the members of certain four years, depending on the regulations of the municipality, with the consent of the local parliament Management committees such as B. of the education committee, submits the draft budget, has the right of initiative and a suspensive veto right for communal jōrei and represents the community to the outside world. The mayor's official ordinances , kisoku ( 規則 ), must not violate jōrei . Together one calls jōrei and kisoku sometimes also reiki ( 例規 ), z. B. in collective publications of the legal norms of a prefecture or municipality. As at the prefectural level, citizens have not only recalls but also referendums as a direct means of influencing local government. Small rural communities ( machi , mura below a certain number of inhabitants) can dispense with the convening of a parliament, instead the citizens decide directly in a general assembly (sōkai) of all eligible voters.

tasks

The tasks of the municipalities include infrastructure tasks such as town planning and municipal roads, garbage and sewage disposal, the fire brigade, educational tasks, day-care centers and kindergartens as well as elementary and secondary schools, over which the prefectures have the supervision, and keeping the family registers and the population registers for residents and foreigners. The larger cities take on a few other tasks: The seirei shitei toshi take over partial tasks from the prefectures in many administrative areas and have greater responsibilities than other municipalities, among other things for urban planning, environmental protection, social benefits and education, receive additional income and have additional rights of participation, for example they are allowed to have their own members nominate to the Prefectural Public Security Commission. In some cases, they also take on central government tasks, otherwise mostly assigned to the prefectures, for example, according to the dōro-hō ("Road Law"), they are also responsible for national roads in their area . On the other hand, they delegate some tasks like reporting matters to the boroughs. The chūkaku-shi and tokurei-shi and other shi receive fewer and fewer responsibilities from the prefectures. machi and mura are largely equivalent in their tasks. In the districts of Tokyo, some of the otherwise communal tasks are taken over by the prefecture, in particular the fire brigade, water supply, sewage and the urban planning tasks associated with supply infrastructure; In addition, a considerable part of the communal taxes there do not go to the districts, but to the prefecture, which distributes 55% of it in a financial equalization scheme to the districts for their communal tasks, the remainder to the communal taxes taken over from the prefecture in the area of the districts Retains tasks. According to the law, special districts can now also be set up in other prefectures instead of very large cities, as the governor, parliamentary majority and the mayor of the city of Osaka are striving for in Osaka prefecture. The distribution of municipal tasks and income between the prefecture and districts would not have to be done in the same way as in Tokyo.

Municipal finance

The total income of the municipalities in the 2007 fiscal year was around 49.5 trillion. Yen , of which 39.3% came from municipal taxes (mainly the “citizen tax” ( shi- / ku- / chō- / son-min-zei ), and the wealth tax ( zaisan-zei )), another 19.6% regular (financial equalization ) and special allocations of national taxes and another 10.3% from kokko-shishutsu-kin , funds that are distributed by the central government for tasks that are mostly tied to certain tasks, some of which are shared between the central state and the municipality. The rest has to be covered by issuing bonds and other income.

Political parties in local politics

Many local elections - in 2019 almost 13% of mayoral elections nationwide and around 40% of parliamentary elections - are held in uniform regional elections in years before leap years, most recently in April 2019 .

Outside of the big cities, local politics is not organized in a party-political way, and most of the national parties are organized from above in their structure, that is, they are primarily associations of members of the national parliament. In contrast, members of the Kōmeitō and the Communist Party of Japan are also represented as party politicians in smaller towns and villages. Overall, the local parliaments at the end of 2017 were composed as follows (party affiliations according to the candidate registrations in the last election):

Aggregate composition of local parliaments
Party (as of December 31, 2019)		MPs
Party (as of December 31, 2019)		number	percent
	Kōmeitō	2,709	9.1
	Communist Party of Japan	2,503	8.41
	Liberal Democratic Party	2,180	7.32
	Constitutional Democratic Party	463	1.56
	Social Democratic Party	212	0.71
	People's Democratic Party	203	0.68
	Nippon Ishin no Kai	146	0.49
	NHK kara Kokumin o Mamoru Tō	39	0.13
	Others	523	1.76
	Independent	20,784	69.8

25,425 of the MPs were men, 4,337 women, which corresponds to a proportion of women of 14.6%.

Of 1,740 mayors (without vacancies), 1,728 were elected without a party at the end of 2019. Nationwide there were only 35 mayors, 27 in independent cities and special districts, eight in [district] cities and villages.

history

After the Meiji Restoration , the new government developed a modern structure of administration in several steps; By 1890, the main types of administrative units that subdivide Japan to this day emerged. While the prefectures were still more closely tied to the instructions of the imperial government until the Pacific War - governors in the empire were mostly officials of the Ministry of the Interior and local representatives of the imperial government anyway - there used to be a more pronounced one in the municipalities, even if from today's perspective also quite limited Self-management.

The "system of large and small districts" ( 大区小区制 , Daiku-shōku-sei ), which was set up shortly after the restoration in 1871/72 and linked to the registration law ( Koseki ), was replaced in 1878: with the Gun-ku-chō-son- hensei-hō ( 郡区町村編制法 , "Law on the organization of gun, ku, machi and mura"), the counties, gun , were reactivated, which - like the provinces - go back to the Chinese-inspired state reforms of antiquity and still served as a geographical division of the country, but had no meaning as an administrative unit long before the Restoration. Many districts were divided or adapted to a division that had already arisen when the prefectures were set up, united or renamed, and some areas were separated as urban districts or "districts" ( ku ): the three capitals of Kyōto, Osaka and Tokyo were divided into several such districts divided, other large cities, especially the contract ports opened in unequal treaties, formed as a whole a district. Both rural districts and urban districts / districts were further subdivided into urban and village units, machi and mura - many of which correspond to today's districts. The exact timing of the implementation of the law varied from prefecture to prefecture. Also in 1878, two further laws modernized the prefectures, together the reforms of 1878 are also referred to as chihō san-shinpō ( 地方三新法 , about "the three new regional laws ").

In 1880 the Meiji government issued the ku-chō-son-kai-hō ( 区町村会法 , "Law on District, City and Village Assemblies"), with which the communities received councils elected under census . These, together with the prefectural assemblies (fu-ken-kai) established in 1878 , were the first popular representations designed by the Meiji oligarchy as a test case for the introduction of a constitution and a national assembly (kokkai) , such as the "movement for freedom and civil rights" demanded. The government promised a constitution and parliament a year later, in 1881. Before the Imperial Constitution finally came into force (1890) , however, the local administrations were to be fundamentally redesigned: Between 1888 and 1890, the government enacted prefecture and rural districts, which were largely designed by Prussian advisors - and municipal regulations.

The municipal code for (district) towns and villages ( chō-son-sei ) and the community code for (district-free) cities ( shi-sei ) were issued in 1888. These introduced local self-government, partly based on the Prussian model. The municipal ordinances were implemented in most of the prefectures in 1889. At the same time, in a state-wide regional reform from a total of 71,314 machi and mura 15,859 municipalities, including the first of the newly introduced (independent) cities ( shi ) , which replaced the previous urban districts / districts. Since then, the three main forms of community shi-chō-son have existed in large parts of Japan . In the prefectures of Okinawa and Hokkaidō, which were not yet fully equivalent , and also for certain island communities in other prefectures, separate regulations were in force, in some cases until the Pacific War.

According to the municipal ordinances of 1888, only the mayors of municipalities belonging to a district were elected indirectly, in the independent cities the city council nominated three mayor candidates, one of whom was then appointed, and in the three most important cities of Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto the citizens had no influence at all Management of the administration: There the governor of the respective prefecture became mayor of the prefecture capital in personal union. The abolition of this special regulation was demanded by the bourgeois parties in the lower house of the Reichstag established in 1890 , but it lasted until 1898 because of the resistance of the manor house . In the 1910s there were some reforms of the communal order. The counties were abolished as an administrative unit in the 1920s. As at the national and prefectural level, from 1926 there was general, equal suffrage for men in municipal parliament elections. Between 1926 and 1943 the mayors of independent cities were also elected indirectly. In 1943, under the war cabinet of General Tōjō, all municipalities were again subjected to the instructions of the imperial government or the governors, mayors were again appointed by the interior minister, as in the Meiji period, the city of Tokyo was abolished and integrated into the Tokyo Prefecture.

During the occupation , some reforms were enacted as early as 1946, and in 1947 the post-war constitution and the “Law on Local Self-Government” established local self-government essentially in its current form. Since then, mayors have been elected directly by the people - now men and women - in all municipalities. In addition, the tokubetsu-ku ("special districts") were created in the former urban area of Tokyo with almost the same rights of self-government as other municipalities, which were later restricted again after the end of the occupation. In addition, the citizens in prefectures and municipalities can now directly influence the administration through various forms of “direct input” ( chokusetsu seikyū : petitions, recalls , popular initiatives). In addition, municipalities can adopt “ordinances on referendums” ( 住民投票条例 , jūmin tōhyō jōrei ); The referendums carried out on this basis are not legally binding, but they are politically binding to a high degree and have led to a number of nationally and internationally recognized decisions since the 1990s. B. 2001 when the citizens of Kariwa municipality (Niigata prefecture) rejected MOX fuel elements or in 2006 when the citizens of Iwakuni city (Yamaguchi prefecture) rejected a US base .

Amalgamation of municipalities, which are periodically promoted by the government, reduced the total number of municipalities by almost 90% compared to 1889; in 2014 there were still 1,718 municipalities (not including “special districts”). In some places, however, voters and / or politicians reject the amalgamation of municipalities, in Miyada (Nagano) in 1956 an incorporation carried out in 1954 was even reversed under public pressure.

Development of the number of municipalities (without "special districts")
year	1888	1889	1922	1945	1953	Apr 1956	Sept 1956	1965	1975	1985	1995	1999	2004	2005	2006	2010	2014
shi-cho-son	-	15,859	12,315	10,520	9,868	4,668	3,975	3,392	3,257	3,253	3.234	3,229	3,100	2,395	1,821	1,727	1,718
shi	-	39	91	205	286	495	498	560	643	651	663	671	695	739	777	786	790
machi / chō	(71,314)	15,820	1,242	1,797	1,966	1,870	1,903	2.005	1,974	2,001	1.994	1,990	1,872	1.317	846	757	745
mura / son	(71,314)	15,820	10,982	8,518	7,616	2,303	1,574	827	640	601	577	568	533	339	198	184	183

literature

Kurt Steiner: Local Government in Japan. Stanford University Press, Stanford 1965.

Web links

Jichitai Kokusaika Kyōkai ( 自治体国際化協会 "Society for the Internationalization of Territorial Corporations"; CLAIR): Local Government in Japan (bilingual English & Japanese), Les collectivités locales au Japon (bilingual French & Japanese) 2016
Sōmushō (English MIC) 2009, published by CLAIR: Local self-government in Japan: Your current situation and problems (PDF; 840 kB) (Japanese, English ; PDF; 870 kB)
Seisaku Kenkyū Daigakuin Daigaku ( 政策研究大学院大学 , GRIPS, English National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies ), Hikō chihō jichi kenkyū center ( 比較地方自治研究センター , English The Institute for Comparative Studies in Local Governance , COSLOG): の. が国国国地方自治の成立・発展 ( Waga-kuni no chihō jichi no seiritsu, had ; English Historical Development of Japanese Local Governance )