When I launched the Institute for Studies in Happiness, Economy and Society (ISHES) in 2011, I had initially intended to name it the Institute for Degrowth Studies. But when I consulted Dennis Meadows, co-author of The Limits to Growth, his advice to me was, “It’s better to put something positive—like happiness—in the name.” And ever since, I have felt how right Dennis’s advice was, and I’m grateful for it.
At ISHES, we study how societies can move beyond economic growth and build well-being within ecological limits. While in Europe, degrowth is often framed as a deliberate choice, with wealthy nations choosing to contract, in Japan, much of what looks like degrowth in practice has emerged instead from adaptation to unavoidable realities: depopulation, aging, and the shrinking of rural economies.
Yet, we have found something promising: living experiments in how communities and local governments can function, and even thrive, without growth as their organizing goal. Japan’s version of degrowth is distinctive, and that distinctiveness may be the most useful starting point.
A useful way to organize the landscape is into three layers: ideas, lifestyle and community practices, and place-based cases.
On the level of ideas, the most internationally visible figure is Kohei Saito, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tokyo. His book Capital in the Anthropocene was published in English in early 2024 as Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto and became an international bestseller. In it, he builds his argument for “degrowth communism” out of a rereading of late-period Karl Marx.
But I should add that Saito is a theorist—his work is the intellectual backdrop, not itself an example of applied practice. A readable interview in his own words is here. For context, placing him within the broader degrowth lineage (E. F. Schumacher, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, the Limits to Growth thinkers including Dennis Meadows), and specifically within the Japanese setting, two long-form pieces are worth reading, here and here, with the second focused directly on Japan.
Closer to the question of applying these ideas to an actual society is the work of ISHES. Its report, “Life Beyond Growth” (produced by Alan AtKisson and co-authored by Alan and me for the Japanese edition), grew out of the post-disaster question of “what really matters” and was released to coincide with the 40th anniversary of The Limits to Growth.
For the practical framing dilemma every practitioner runs into—that questioning growth provokes the reaction, “So you want to stop the economy?”—an open seminar discussion on moving beyond a GDP-versus-happiness binary is useful, as is this interview with Helena Norberg-Hodge that tackles the “dilemma of economic growth” (i.e., growth is unsustainable, but degrowth is unstable) head-on.
At the level of lifestyle and community practices, the examples become more concrete and transferable.
Transition Town Fujino, in Sagamihara City, Kanagawa Prefecture, was one of the first fully functioning nodes of the UK-born Transition movement in Japan. Established in autumn 2008, it launched a local currency called Yorozuya, and after the Fukushima nuclear accident, its residents organized their own community power initiative, Fujino Denryoku. What makes it valuable for practitioners is that three core degrowth tools—local currency, permaculture, and energy self-sufficiency—are running together in one place. ISHES documents the energy-independence dimension in detail, including the practical economics of citizen-installed solar, framed explicitly as building resilience through a “lifeline backup.” The United Nations University has also written about Transition Town Fujino.
“Half Farmer, Half X” is a lifestyle model originated by Naoki Shiomi from Ayabe, Kyoto Prefecture. It proposes farming enough to meet your own needs and devoting the rest of your time to your calling (the “X”). Shiomi developed the idea in the mid-1990s, around the time of the 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, and established the Half Farmer, Half X Research Center in Ayabe in 2000. The model has since spread well beyond Japan; the initial book about it has gone through multiple printings in Taiwan and circulated in China. For a practitioner, its significance is that it reframes “earning less” not as sacrifice but as spiritual enrichment, and it adapts naturally to depopulated communities (for example, a “Half Farmer, Half Caretaker” who meets a real local need while doing meaningful work).
ISHES provides both a concise case description and a substantial four-part interview with Shiomi himself, in which he distinguishes the concept from mere part-time farming and traces its roots back to earlier Japanese ideas (the novelist Toson Shimazaki used “half farmer, half artist” as early as 1926). A primary source featuring Shiomi in his own voice, in English, is this podcast conversation.
On the level of place-based cases, the standout is Ama Town, on the island of Nakanoshima in the Oki Islands, Shimane Prefecture. In the early 2000s, the town treated depopulation as an existential threat and actively worked to attract new residents (it now has a population of around 2,200). Its slogan, “Nai-Mono-Wa-Nai” (“what we don’t have, we do without”), carries a deliberate double meaning: we can live without material abundance and fashionable entertainment, and at the same time everything essential—nature, community, a self-sufficient life—is already here. With no department store, convenience store, or movie theater, young residents responded not by lamenting what was missing but by saying, in effect, “if there’s nothing fun here, let’s create it.”
For practitioners, this is the clearest working model of sufficiency as an organizing principle rather than deprivation. ISHES documents Ama from three angles: a case study, a concept explainer, and the slides and script from a talk I gave at the 2018 ISQOLS (International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies) conference, the last being especially valuable as a citable account in English.
At the prefectural and municipal scales, Toyama Prefecture offers an example of how to rework what “growth” means amid depopulation. In 2023, it developed its own set of well-being indicators and made well-being a pillar of its growth strategy—an approach it describes as unique in the world. Toyama City’s well-known measures, such as letting residents who buy flowers downtown ride public transit for free, fit the same theme of vitality in an era of shrinking population.
Tying these together is a methodology I use, the “Hop, Step, Jump!” approach to community development:
- Hop: Use backcasting and visualize the desired future of your community
- Step: Use systems thinking to visualize the underlying structures
- Jump: Design and implement your community development project
This methodology has been applied in several municipalities across Japan; it frames the work not as contraction or endurance but as building a virtuous cycle. This approach is a way of communicating that degrowth in Japan is less about pessimism than about creative redesign.
Although the context for degrowth is somewhat different in other wealthy countries, I would be more than happy if some of these examples from Japan could help inspire similar efforts elsewhere.
