Chapter 2

# Deploying Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Administration Tailored to Urges of the Times

## Section 1

## Driving the Implementation of a National Land Policy Package

The implementation of a comprehensive national land policy package has been driven on the basis of a full package of measures designed to guide the work of national spatial land planning; namely, National Spatial Strategies (national plan) (2008 Cabinet decision), which envisions “the construction of a national land where diverse regional blocks develop autonomously and the creation of a beautiful national land where life is comfortable” as a new vision of national land, Global Regional Plans (2009 Minister decision), which summarize the regional strategies of the individual global blocks and the specific approaches they take to implement the strategies and the Fourth National Land Use Plan (national plan) (2008 Cabinet decision), which is committed to a key principle of sustainable land management. The implementation of these plans is being monitored from year to year to get them consolidated among the stakeholders concerned with National Spatial Strategies.

About seven years since the formulation of National Spatial Strategies (national plan), Japan is confronted with drastic changes, such as intensifying competition between nations and cities in pace with progressive globalization and imminent possible threats from huge natural disasters, such as the Nankai Trough Mega Earthquake and Tokyo Inland Earthquake, as well as a rapidly shrinking population in an aging society with falling birthrates, with the population predicted to halve in about 60% of all the regions in 2050 and elderly people accounting for about 40% of the total population. To address these changes, it is necessary to share the sense of crisis and then put together the wisdom of the public people to conceive national land policies from long-term perspectives.

In July 2014, the “Grand Design of National Spatial Development towards 2050” was compiled and released as a guide to land and community development from mid- to long-term perspectives (generally 2050), which aims to help develop varied regional individualities at a higher level of refinement by “compact” and “networked” to stir inter-regional convection, or develop a “convection-promoting national land”.

A planning subcommittee was then organized under the National Land Council to update the National Spatial Strategies in September of the same year and summarized the key concepts of planning in an interim report in March 2015.

Further reviews will be carried on with a view to finalizing a National Plan by about the summer of 2015 while seeking views from broad quarters, including localities. As for Global Regional Plans, studies have just started to bring them to finalization by the end of FY2015.

## Section 2

### Measures, etc. against Aging Social Infrastructures

## (1) Formulating a MLIT's Action Plans for Life Extension of Infrastructure

In Japan, those infrastructures that have been built after the rapid-growth period of the nation’s economy, including Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway Route 1 laid after the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, are forecast to get aged simultaneously in the future, with the proportion of facilities that will reach 50 years of age or older in 20 years to come expanding at an accelerating pace. The ratio of the number of such highway bridges, for example, is predicted to surge from about 18% in 2013 to about 43% 10 years later and to about 67% 20 years later (Figure II-2-2-1). Simultaneously aging infrastructures should dictate strategic maintenance/management and renewal.

The MLIT defined the year 2013 as the “First Year of Social Infrastructures Maintenance” and inaugurated the Social Infrastructure Anti-Aging Conference headed by the Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism in January of the same year in its full commitment to combat aging social infrastructures. After pursuing comprehensive, cross-section debates, the conference finalized a roadmap titled “Interim Measures to be Taken to Maintain, Manage and Renew Social Infrastructure” in March of the same year.

In October of the same year, the “Liaison Conference among Ministries and Agencies Concerned with the Promotion