ABSTRACT
When it comes to urban safety, which can be regarded as the basis to live, Japanese cities are always nominated as the highest ranking in the world. While Tokyo was named as the safest city in the world by The Economist, Osaka, the second largest metropolitan area in Japan, came third.
Though Osaka’s municipal and prefectural governments don’t explicitly define the words livable or livability as terms to be used for local or regional policies, some keywords which mean livability have been shown in a variety of economic and industrial policies or projects of both public and private organizations. For example, the Japanese word, Genki, meaning healthy, vibrant, or livable, is often shown in projects and policies in Osaka, which is not seen in Tokyo.
One of the reasons Osaka sticks to livability is the modern history of Osaka and Kansai, the name of the regions including Osaka and surrounding cities and towns, including Kyoto and Kobe. The Kansai region has a much longer history as the capital region of Japan than the present capital, Tokyo. However, the national structure of Japan has been mono-centralized to Tokyo since the modernization of Japan and especially after the 1980s, when Japan became a developed country and the world economy globalized. While Tokyo has expanded the population and economic scale and become one of the high-ranking world cities, Osaka and Kansai, the second largest metropolitan area in Japan, still has rather old and localized social and economic structures and a decreasing population. Most research in Japan insists that the Osaka metropolitan area has already started to depopulate. Osaka will be the first depopulating megacity in the world, whose population is more than 10 million.
In that sense, rivalry of Osaka’s people is the strongest motivation to revitalize Osaka to catch up to Tokyo and make it livable again, especially in terms of the local and regional economy. Osaka’s municipal or prefectural governments don’t show their official criteria for measuring livability, but they are always quite conscious of the comparison with Japan’s average and Tokyo’s situation.
There are long-time disputes in Osaka and Kansai, whether they should look to Tokyo and try to follow it or go another and unique way by using resources they possess through the long history. Evaluation of livability in Osaka and Kansai would be quite different depending on the recognition and interpretation of people and groups in Osaka and Kansai.
