Southwest Japan’s Challenges: Global Wave / Beef Cattle Production Center Miyakonojo Grows as Hub of Southern Kyushu Region

By Hiroki Ikeda / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer

21:00 JST, March 13, 2025

This is the fifth installment of a series that follows the waves of change taking place in Kyushu and nearby Yamaguchi and Okinawa prefectures ahead of 2050.

MIYAKONOJO, Miyazaki — Miyakonojo, a city in Miyazaki Prefecture that commands a magnificent view of the Kirishima mountain range, held its first auction of 2025 for calves of kuroge wagyu (black-haired Japanese cattle) on Jan. 15-17.

In a marketplace filled with heat and the odors of livestock, 891 cattle were auctioned off for prices that reached as high as ¥970,000.

A calf belonging to breeder Natsuo Iwamoto was sold for ¥530,000.

“It’s rewarding to see the cattle I’ve raised since birth valued so highly,” said Iwamoto, who has worked in cattle breeding for about 19 months. “I hope someday one of mine can be the one that gets the highest price.”

For nearly 30 years, Iwamoto, now 56, ran an izakaya Japanese-style pub with his mother and others in Sakai, but the establishment closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the invitation of an acquaintance from Miyakonojo, Iwamoto learned cattle farming in the southern Kyushu city from a farmer who was looking for a successor and then took possession of a 50-year-old barn and 30 breeding cows. He built a house in Miyakonojo with the money he made from selling the land of his home in Sakai. He is enthusiastic about “giving my second life to cows.”

Ryuji Matsuyama, a cattle hoof trimmer with about 30 years of experience who is also the former director of the local Japan Agricultural Cooperatives (JA) organization, said: “I’ve never heard of someone who isn’t a relative taking over a breeding farm. It makes me really feel like Miyakonojo has become famous enough to bring in all sorts of people.”

¥19.3 bil. in fiscal 2023

“Much joy from Miyakonojo: Japan’s best meat and shochu liquor.” Posters bearing this text dominate platform pillars of Tokyo Monorail Haneda Airport Terminal 1 Station, which is passed through by travelers from all over Japan.

This advertising strategy was the brainchild of Miyakonojo native Takahisa Ikeda, a former finance bureaucrat who became mayor in 2012.

Ikeda, now 53 and on his fourth term in office, raised the city’s profile by promoting locally produced meat, as well as alcohol from Kirishima Shuzo Co., which boasts the nation’s highest shochu sales, as thank-you gifts under the furusato nozei hometown tax donation system. Taxes paid to the city under the system rose from a few million yen a year to ¥19.3 billion in fiscal 2023, making Miyakonojo the top donation recipient among all Japanese municipalities for the second year in a row.

“In Tokyo, people used to read [the characters in] ‘Miyakonojo’ as ‘Tojo,’ and izakaya would mistakenly serve Kurokirishima [shochu] as ‘made in Kagoshima Prefecture,’” Ikeda said, recalling the early days of his tenure.

The city used the furusato nozei tax revenue as a source of funding to expand its support system for people moving into the city. In fiscal 2024 it offered new arrival subsidies of up to ¥5 million per household. It also offers free daycare to support people raising children. As a result, 5,136 people moved into the city between fiscal 2023 and the end of December 2024. In April, its population recorded an increase for the first time in 13 years, as a wave of change has swept through the city.

Eighty percent of the city’s incoming heads of households are in their 20s to 40s, and the city is short of childcare facilities, of which it had 87, tending to 7,242 children, as of December. The city has established a subsidy system to secure childcare workers and is building extensions to some elementary schools.

Building infrastructure

Miyakonojo, which has a population of around 160,000 people, has rushed to build more infrastructure in the past few years.

In 2022, the city developed a 20-hectare industrial complex near the Miyazaki Expressway’s Miyakonojo Interchange, consisting of 12 lots that came to be occupied by meat packers and other businesses.

Long-distance truck driver Kai Yukizaki moved into Miyakonojo — his wife’s hometown — from Yao, Osaka Prefecture, in summer 2023, in advance of the birth of their first son. Kusamizu Unso, the company he works for, had opened a branch operations center in the complex. The couple received a ¥2 million benefit from the city.

“The houses and parks are bigger here than in Osaka, so we feel comfortable raising a child here. I’m glad we came,” Yukizaki said.

The 44-kilometer-long Miyakonojo-Shibushi Road is being built to serve as the main artery through Japan’s leading livestock production area. The Miyakonojo section opened on Feb. 15, while the Shibushi section, in Kagoshima Prefecture, will open on March 23. It will allow people to travel between the Miyakonojo Interchange and Shibushi Port, a cattle feed distribution center, in about 40 minutes. The city also plans to build two more factory complexes of about 22 hectares in total.

Miyazaki Medical Association Hospital, which accepts emergency patients from inside and outside Miyakonojo, is now building a heart and cerebrovascular center meant to accept severely ill patients who would otherwise have to be medevaced to hospitals in Miyazaki City. The center is scheduled to open in June.

The city is also well-supplied with leisure facilities. Snow Peak Miyakonojo Campfield, which opened last year in Sekinoo Park and includes a campsite and cottages, has been growing in popularity.

Miyakonojo, located inland, will serve as a support base for the coastal areas in the event of a Nankai Trough earthquake. In preparation for such an occasion, the city uses some of its furusato nozei funds to boost the functions of local facilities. It renovated the Miyakonojo NiQLL roadside rest area in 2023, quadrupling its parking area to accommodate about 220 vehicles. It also has a warehouse for stockpiling goods in case of emergency. Yamanokuchi Sports Park, which has a new athletics field built by the prefecture, will also become a disaster response base.

“With this infrastructure in place, there will be more companies in the city, which will attract more young people, creating a virtuous cycle that will bring in even more companies,” Miyakonojo Chamber of Commerce and Industry Chairman Koichi Yasuda, 80, said. “Miyakonojo will serve as the hub of the southern Kyushu region.”

A shortage of successors

One challenge the city is now facing is a shortage of successors for the current generation of cattle farmers, whose work supports the production of the beef that serves as a source of wealth for the city.

According to the local JA organization, there were about 860 farms with 23,000 mother cows in the city in 2022, but the figure dropped to about 700 farms with about 19,300 mother cows by the end of 2024. The rising cost of feed accelerated the decline in the numbers.

However, the volume of beef exported from Miyazaki Prefecture increased nearly threefold over five years to 1,248 tons in 2023, with further growth expected in exports to Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

“Miyakonojo is attracting younger generations with its child-rearing support measures, and our focus now is on whether the city’s total fertility rate [which averaged 1.74 from 2018 to 2022] will increase,” Kousuke Motani, a senior researcher at the Japan Research Institute, Ltd. said. “Miyakonojo should make the case to the rest of the country that agriculture will be a growth industry in the Reiwa era.”