ABSTRACT
The city of Yokohama has been renowned as the hub of kaikoku (open-door policy) since 1858, when Tokugawa Japan opened the port of Yokohama to foreign trade and permitted foreigners to live there. As Table 7.1 demonstrates, Yokohama’s commitment to kokusai kōken (contribution to the international community), which had been translated into policies and practices, has manifested itself in a variety of texts and speeches. This chapter will examine the ways in which norms may outweigh immediate utility, more specifically those ways in which Yokohama’s reputation as an international city provided a foundation for shaping a collective self-understanding of normative commitment to international environmental cooperation. Among the largest Japanese ports (in terms of the value of foreign trade), both Yokohama and Nagoya are well known for their high fiscal capacity and staff resources, on the part of the city governments, yet the latter has conducted a minimal level of international environmental cooperation. The localized motives for Yokohama to take up an active role in decentralized international cooperation deserve a closer examination. This study finds that no matter who occupied the mayor’s office, Yokohama’s historical legacy and international orientation motivated it to respond to needs for development assistance and environmental cooperation. According to a nationwide survey, conducted in 2012 by the Brand Research Institute, Yokohama is ranked first in the nation as the most “internationalized” city. Yet, as local conditions and needs change, the patterns and nature of decentralized international cooperation will also be transformed, accordingly, to meet them. This can be seen in Yokohama’s new strategy to promote international cooperation for the benefit of local business. Local governments in Japan, like those in other OECD countries, remain small contributors to international environmental cooperation but they can be a significant part of environmental strategies at the global level by sharing their know-how and local experience with partner countries. Previous studies indicate, “Only the largest municipalities extend any significant amounts of aid.”1 More specifically, the scale of international environmental cooperation and their fiscal capacity have significant positive correlations with each other.2 Indeed, Yokohama is one of the wealthiest municipalities in Japan. In 2008 and 2009, the city did not receive the Local Allocation Tax (national transfer payments to local
governments), whereby revenues are set aside as a shared resource among local authorities to be reallocated to each authority. The more affluent a city becomes, the less the municipal government receives the national transfer payments. The Local Allocation Tax is designed to ensure a similar level of government services and investment across the nation. In the fiscal years of 2008 and 2009, only 3 percent of the total number of local governments did not receive this tax. According to Yokohama City’s 2013 budget, Local Allocation Tax as a percentage of total revenues was 1.4 percent and its financial strength index (total value of basic financial revenue/basic financial demand value) was 0.96, which was the fourth highest among all the 20 designated cities.3 Given the average financial strength index of 0.49 for municipalities and that of 0.85 for designated cities, Yokohama financially occupies a preferable position to engage in international cooperation at its discretion, as fiscal capacity is one of the necessary conditions for decentralized international cooperation. As discussed previously, both Yokohama and Nagoya are well known as being two of the big three ports in terms of value of foreign trade and also as among the wealthiest governments among designated cities, yet Nagoya, with physical and socio-economic environments similar to Yokohama, has been weakly responsive to national policy and global strategies and cooperated only minimally. The following section will look beneath the structural factors to find more qualitative evidence of localized motives for Yokohama’s involvement in decentralized international cooperation.
