Japan’s regional airports: conflicting national, regional and local interests Thomas Feldhoff * Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Geography, Gerhard-Mercator-University Duisburg, 47048 Duisburg, Germany Abstract Globalization is currently a hotly discussed topic, and one of the most important means of linking modern industrialized and globalized societies is air transport. Since the late 1950s Japan has been expanding its airport infrastructure all over the country. The current peculiarities of the airport system cannot be attributed solely to natural and regional economic features, however. A par- ticularly interesting and revealing question relates to the actors involved in Japanese airport policies and their strategies and in- terests. This paper will therefore focus on the politicians, ministerial bureaucrats and businessmen who form Japan’s so-called ‘‘iron triangle’’. We will look at airport policies in hopes of gaining insights into the networks of relationships between these actors, their power structures and how stable these networks and structures are under the conditions resulting from the recent political reforms. Ó 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Japan; Air traffic; Regional airports; Iron triangle; Political reform 1. Introduction The current process of globalization is characterized by increasingly interconnected flows of persons, goods and capital, information and communications world- wide. As a result of the rapid innovations in transport and communication systems, the world has been said to be ‘‘shrinking’’ both spatially and temporally. This has led to a change in traditional geographical ways of looking at things, for which in urban research the slogan ‘‘from space to place’’ has been coined (Castells, 1993). ‘‘Global cities’’ develop as places where activities, functions and informations are highly concentrated. The complex connections between globalization and urban development have become a topic of urban systems re- search. Because of the increasing cross-border links and exchange relationships, cities have been interpreted as part of a worldwide system of competing centers (Friedman, 1995; Sassen, 1991, 1994). Ranked at the tip of the network are the ‘‘global cities’’, which function as the points in space where the production, financial and control relationships meet. Cities have been ranked on the basis of very different indicators, so that lists of world cities continue to be very heterogeneous. A large number of recent studies on transportation, however, stress the importance of worldwide accessibility of cities via efficient means of air transport (Graham, 1995; Rietveld and Bruinsma, 1998; Shin and Timberlake, 2000). With the increasing im- portance of mobility and speed the centrality of a place has evidently come to play a more and more important role in the competition between cities. For geographers dealing with transportation, air transport is a space- adjusting technology and as such a crucial condition for the real space–time compression processes and for the global linkage of modern industrialized societies (Janelle and Beuthe, 1997). Consequently, airports should not be seen merely as air transport’s ground stations. Because of their spatial impact as locational and economic fac- tors, they are also a central object of transport and re- gional planning policies. In post-war Japan the demand for passenger and freight services grew continuously over many years, parallel to the constant high economic growth rates. Japan’s regional development is, however, characterized by an extreme concentration of population and eco- nomic power in the three metropolitan regions of T^ oky^ o, ^ Osaka and Nagoya on the Pacific ‘‘front side’’. Since the late 1980s, some authors have especially been * Tel.: +49-203-379-2250; fax: +49-203-379-3516. E-mail addresses: t.feldhoff@mail.isis.de, t.feldhoff@uni-duisburg.de (T. Feldhoff). 0966-6923/02/$ - see front matter Ó 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII:S0966-6923(02)00009-1 Journal of Transport Geography 10 (2002) 165–175 www.elsevier.com/locate/jtrangeo