In 2006 for the first time in Japan, Yubari city in Hokkaido declared fiscal collapse due to huge amount of debt. She has no choice but to accept harsh structural reform plan offered by central government.
Though Yubari’s fiscal crisis is mainly due to incapability of adaptation to the central government’s structural change of regional policy which is called ‘Trinity Reform’, only Yubari’s moral hazard, an irresponsible fiscal management and illegal accounting operation, was greatly emphasized.
New Rights in Japan could hold the power since 2000 by combining structural reform based on neo-liberalism and nationalism which insists on escaping from post war system. In order to eliminate dissatisfaction caused by social disparity due to structural reform, loyal attitude to ‘country and home town (okuni/furusato)’ has been recalled.
In these context, the case of Yubari city could be recognized as ‘Kiriste’(discard) of the weak. Self-responsibility theory is, as usual, used as an explanation when government transfers their burdens to individual, it has been spread in transformed form in Yubari’s case as the penalty for moral hazard, that the fiscal crisis comes from their own fault.
The frame of self-responsibility has been working for protecting the disputes on the efficiency of fiscal policy to Yubari city, and it gives central government an indulgence to discarding regional policy.