Do Young People in Regional Cities of Japan Really Shift Away from Owning Automobiles? – From an Empirical Study and a Semi-structured Interview

The objective of this study is to see whether young people in regional cities of Japan have really shifted away from owning automobiles. To accomplish this, the authors firstly analyze empirical data about driver’s license statistics and consumer confidence survey to make clarified whether young people living in such places have really become not to drive. Then the authors implement a semi-structured interview to show whether and how their views to automobiles have changed. From the empirical analyses, although there is a trend away from having a driver’s license in terms of both the nationwide average and that of regional cities in Japan, the ratio in regional cities are still much higher than the nationwide average. On the other hand, from the fieldwork, (1) the current young people do not consider having an automobile as high-status and (2) the views to having an automobile can be classified on the basis of three factors, necessity, interests, and whether s/he had an automobile at that time, into five types: aspiration, future, untouched, tool, and heavy users.