decline among the 1,800 local municipalities (cities, towns, and villages) in the nation. As if to defy that prediction, however, Kamiyama’s in-migration surpassed its out-migration for the first time in history in 2011. Today, there are a number of IT company satellite offices that have created new employment, and residents have started up all kinds of businesses, making Kamiyama one of the country’s most creative and dynamic towns. In their June 2017 issue, Forbes Japan put Kamiyama in second place in their Innovative City Ranking, behind Fukuoka City. It has even appeared in a junior high school social studies textbook as an example of successful regional regeneration. Below I will trace the route by which this small rural town that government research predicted had a high chance ofdisappearing achieved such a miraculous feat.

Regional revitalization that started with a blue-eyed doll The regional revitalization initiative in Kamiyama started with a small doll sent from the United States. [3] Around 1930, during the world financial panic, the movement to expel Japanese immigrants from the US was gathering strength. An American who had spent time in Japan as a missionary lamented this situation and launched an appeal to send dolls to Japan as a gesture of peace and goodwill, resulting in over 12,000 dolls being shipped to preschools and elementary schools around Japan. When the Pacific War began in 1941, these dolls became gifts from the enemy and almost all of them incinerated or thrown out. Only about 300 remained. One of them was a doll with blue