Rebel Rich.(what the world will look like in 2012)(sovereignty for Hokkaido, Japan)

A rebellion is brewing on Japan's northern frontier. This one doesn't involve armed guerrillas, or even a last-gasp campaign by Hokkaido's few remaining indigenous people, the Ainu, demanding the return of lands occupied by displaced samurai in the 19th century. No, Japan's next territorial struggle will be bloodless and democratic. It will happen when Hokkaido's roughly 6 million inhabitants simply vote to quit the country of their ancestors.

Fantasy? Today it might seem so, but by 2012 Hokkaido could be a major centrifugal force in Japan, just as it was once a major unifying force. After 1869, Tokyo's drive to colonize the northern "wasteland" marked Japan's birth as a modern nation. Now, more than a century later, calls for expanded self-government, statehood in a Japanese federation or "divorce" from the motherland resonate among Hokkaido's intellectual elite. So unusual is this revolt, one has to wonder whether it foretells a new kind of global-age independence movement: the rebellion of provinces fed up with the economic failures of once rich, stable nations.

If any wealthy country could be called a failed state, it is Japan. In Hokkaido, intellectuals began debating independence when the national economy began its long slide in the early 1990s. Their ranks include sociologists bent on creating a postcolonial identity for the island, agricultural experts who envision ecofriendly commercial farms that could someday feed much of Asia and business people eager for local companies to replace subsidiaries controlled from Tokyo. They've done exhaustive studies forecasting Hokkaido's evolution into a quasi- independent "special economic zone" and encouraged a local tycoon to establish Air Do, a Sapporo-based airline that now competes with carriers from "mainland" Japan. Their ideas even inspired a risky work of science fiction, serialized in Hokkaido's largest newspaper last year, in which the Sapporo government declares independence from Japan. The story could "motivate... the rediscovery of Hokkaido's values," said Tatsuya Hori, the island's real-life governor.

Unlike most postwar independence movements around the world, Hokkaido's has nothing to do with religion or ethnicity. In fact, most Hokkaido nationalists are scions of the families that planted the Japanese flag on the island in the late 1800s. Their ancestors include anti-Meiji samurai clans exiled to the frontier after 1870, and "soldier farmers" later sent to Hokkaido to defend the territory from Russia.

Mythologized as Japan's "frontier," Hokkaido was nonetheless less than a full-fledged member of the empire. Tokyo central planners focused investment on resource extraction (chiefly coal, timber, grain and fish) and the roads, harbors, dams and aqueducts it required. Even today Hokkaido, with just 4.5

percent of Japan's population, consumes about 10 percent of the national public-works budget. That translates into approximately [yen]800 billion per year in new concrete--an addiction that will stop the local economy cold when Tokyo inevitably stops spending. "Hokkaido contributed to the growth of Japan, but was it beneficial for us?" asks Nobuaki Shirai, author of the pro- independence tome "The Theory of Hok-kaido." "Japan's zaibatsu [prewar conglomerates] exploited our island as a resource base, and after being managed by the central government and Tokyo corporations for ...