Showtime rolled around for the most unusual parliamentary session in years Friday, with Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba touting his government’s ¥200 billion ($1.3 billion) regional revitalization policy as “the era’s remodeling of the Japanese archipelago” — a callback to former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka’s calls in the 1970s to allocate economic benefits and costs more fairly across the nation.
Ishiba’s pet policy, dubbed Regional Revitalization 2.0, consists of five pillars — creating regions that attract young people and women; decentralizing society; supporting joint startups across institutions for regional innovation; developing new-age infrastructure for clean energy, digital transformation and artificial intelligence; and increasing cooperation between local governments.
“To further the fostering of comfortable and attractive workplaces for youth and women, a bill on closing the gender pay gap and dispelling unconscious bias will be submitted,” he told the assembly.