As a result of NHK's survey of all governors and mayors of municipalities nationwide ahead of the unified local elections, 8% of them answered that cooperation between the national government and local governments is "established" in response to the new coronavirus, but issues such as information sharing were also highlighted.
Ahead of the unified local elections, NHK conducted the first large-scale survey of all 1788,93 governors and mayors of municipalities nationwide, and received responses from 1664,8 people, or 5%.
When asked how much cooperation and information sharing among the national government, prefectures, and municipalities has been achieved regarding the response to the new coronavirus,
74.3% answered "sufficiently" and 8.15% answered "to some extent," and more than 9%
answered "done."
On the other hand, 0.6% said they were not doing much,
and 3.6%
said they were not doing it at all.
Governor Uchibori of Fukushima Prefecture, who replied, "To some extent," served as acting head of the National Governors' Association's Emergency Response Headquarters and was in charge of compiling recommendations to the government.
Governor Uchibori said, "This is the first time that I have experienced this three-year struggle, and it began with a search. Initially, it took an extremely long time to be applied, but we appealed to the government to make it easier to use, and the governor decided to make it smoother."
He then stated, "In order to respond to the national crisis of the new infectious disease, the government worked together with the National Governors' Association and six local organizations, which points to the image of decentralization, and I believe that the ideal form of decentralization has risen to the next stage."
On the other hand, when we asked governors and mayors who answered "not possible" in the questionnaire about their issues and lessons learned, they said that "the provision of information from the government was slow and did not allow sufficient time to plan and consider projects" and "information on corona-infected people was not provided to municipalities, so they could not take initial responses." Many voices cited information sharing as an issue.