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Nagano City rejects superstore projects

The Nagano City government has blocked four development plans that would destroy its local shopping districts as well as agriculture, its key industry.

Old-style shops with tiled roofs and whitewashed walls stand along an approach to Zenkoji Temple from Nagano Station. Here, a plan arose to construct a 25-hectare superstore, large enough to fit the entire shopping district inside.

Clothing shop owner Takahashi Kazuo recalled, "We have been opposing this plan for the whole past year." Witnessing a "shuttered-shopping avenue" in another city in which a mega store chain moved, he became involved in a campaign against the plan.

Tsukada Kuniyuki of the Nagano Chamber of Commerce and Industry said, "If such a store moved in, local shop owners will have difficulties surviving. I feel angry at the government's deregulation measures that give large-scale retail stores a free hand to make inroads in the suburbs."

Shop owners commonly said, "This is a matter of proper town planning." Proposed sites for the mega store construction included prime agricultural lands that should be conserved into the future. Shop owners talked with citizens and shoppers about the inroads of a large-scale store to their town, "Once farmlands are destroyed, they will never come back. The weak and senior citizens will become isolated because of difficulties of going shopping. The traffic will get heavy. It will most likely not lead to an increase in the city's tax revenues.

A farmer who was to lease his land to the large-store chain expressed his distress, "Only a few are in their 40's out of 132 farmer leaseholders and there is no one in their 30's. Others are all old. We are facing the problem of successors. In addition, the government continues to promote import liberalization of farm products and does nothing to guarantee prices."

Despite being leaseholders, peach farmers Kondo Kon and Kitazawa Yasuhide, both in their late 70's, opposed the plan because they personally knew some leaseholders who had earned rent income while they leased their land to a superstore but could no longer afford to pay property and inheritance taxes after the withdrawal of the store.

The Japanese Communist Party Nagano City Assembly members group has consistently argued against the four plans. The group spent three weeks visiting more than 300 shops to talk with the owners. The JCP group supports the campaign against the plans together with the head of the Nagano Prefecture merchants' association and the Nagano City official in charge of promotion of commerce and industry.
- Akahata, February 28, 2006