Hikaru Komatsu
IPCS, College of Science
National Taiwan University

I visited Japan, my country, this summer. The purpose was to conduct collaborative work on forest ecosystem services with a professor in Kyushu University. But I do not introduce this collaborative work here. It is too technical.

I rather introduce broader social changes I observed in Japan this summer. I believe that this story is more interesting. Importantly, it has implications for future research collaboration between Taiwan and Japan.

One of the places I visited was the Shiiba Station, Kyushu University Forest. This station is located in an area where the population has been declining rapidly (Figure 1a). On the way to this station, I found that a railway had been destroyed and left unfixed since the 2020 flood disaster (Figure 1b). This surprised me a lot, because this was impossible a few decades ago. If the railway had been destroyed a few decades ago, it would have been fixed immediately, possibly within a few months.

What’s the implication of the unfixed railway? It implies that Japanese do not believe economic and population recovery in the future. Japan’s economy has been stagnating and its population has been declining for two decades. If Japan plans to fix the railway, many Japanese would question who pays the money and who uses the railway.

Such a situation is not specific to Japan, but is shared by many developed countries including Taiwan. Indeed, both the interest rate and birth rate have been declining in Taiwan. Can you imagine vigorous economic growth or population growth in the future? What you see now in Japan might be Taiwan’s future.

Figure 1. (a) Location of the Shiiba Station, Kyushu University Forest and (b) a photo showing a railway that has been left unfixed since the 2020 flood disaster.

You might be sad to see the unfixed railway. However, I suggest that it might be a part of the solution for our sustainability problems including climate change.

A few decades ago, economic growth was believed to a solution (or even the solution) for sustainability problems. Major policies of international organizations (e.g., the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the United Nations) assumed that economic growth would enable a greater investment in green technology, which would, in turn, solve sustainability problems.

However, scholars repeatedly report that this assumption is supported neither by existing data and nor by simulations (Hickel and Kallis, 2020; Keyßer and Lenzen, 2021). Scholars are now proposing an alternative solution, i.e., degrowth. Degrowth aims to solve sustainability problems by reducing economic scale.

From this perspective, I surmise that Japan is moving towards a degrowth society. With the stagnant economy and population decline, Japan’s environmental impacts have been declining for more than two decades (Komatsu et al., accepted). In the meanwhile, Japanese have experienced no long-term decline in the level of happiness (Komatsu et al., accepted). A degrowth society might not be as bad as you imagine once you change your value system successfully.

I thus suggest Taiwanese scholars to see Japan as a lab for sustainability studies. I am not saying that you will see many successful examples in Japan. You will definitely find many struggles, confusions, and failures there. But the struggles, confusions, and failures will prepare Taiwan for its future.

Taiwan is very good at learning from other countries. I have recognized this through the Covid-19 pandemic. Taiwan was carefully watching what problems other countries like Japan had, how they responded to the problems, and how they failed. Taiwan distilled lessons from such observations to come up with a better policy response. Indeed, Taiwan coped with the pandemic more successfully than Japan did. Taiwan can do the same thing for sustainability problems.

One final note: you should see rural areas in Japan rather than urban areas (e.g., Tokyo). Rural areas are more “advanced”, because problems are much more serious there. There, you will see a number of people rearticulating the problems. The professor I visited this summer is one of them. Despite his scientific background, he is now developing a plan for sustainable society of the village where the university forest is located.

I hope that Taiwan will learn from such people. I am sure that Taiwanese scholars will come up with a better solution, which will, in turn, inspire Japanese scholars to contemplate their solutions. I hope that Taiwan and Japan will keep learning mutually.

References
Hickel, J., & Kallis, G. (2020). Is Green Growth possible? New Political Economy, 25, 469-486. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2019.1598964
Keyßer, L.T., & Lenzen, M. (2021). 1.5 °C degrowth scenarios suggest the need for new mitigation pathways. Nature Communications, 12, 2676. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22884-9
Komatsu, H., Rappleye, J., & Uchida, Y. Is happiness possible in a degrowth society? Futures, accepted.