For Tokyo and other Japanese metropolises, the post-World War II boom years were the best of times. Not so, however, for Japan's remote provinces and rural areas. Here, incomes declined and populations dwindled as young people drifted away in search of better lives in the city. Oita Prefecture, on the northeast coast of Kyushu Island, was such a place. Once Japan's gateway to the outside world and an early center for Western learning in Asia, by the 1970s Oita was merely a backwater. In a nation rising quickly to wealth, Oita idled in relative poverty.

Governor Morihiko Hiramatsu has changed this.

Born in Oita City in 1924, Hiramatsu rose through local schools and served in the Imperial Japanese Navy. Later he studied law at Tokyo University and, upon graduating in 1949, joined the powerful national ministry now known as MITI—the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. There he helped to regulate and advise Japan's emerging electronics industry and observed the world-changing impact of computer technology. In 1975, he returned to Oita as vice-governor. Four years later he was elected governor.

How to revitalize Oita? Solving this problem became Hiramatsu's passion. Certain regions, he knew, had made a name for themselves by producing signature products—tangerines, pottery, shiitake mushrooms. Why not encourage every community to devote itself to a single product in which it could truly excel? This concept became the basis of Hiramatsu's innovative development plan: One village, one product.

Exploiting the spirit of local rivalry rooted in Oita's feudal past, Hiramatsu incited competition among the prefecture's diverse communities as each one sought to identify and perfect a product of its own: Kakosu limes, Himeshima prawns, Oyama plums, and Beppu bambooware and hot springs. Building self-reliance was an important goal of the program. There were no subsidies. Instead, Hiramatsu provided technical assistance to improve the local goods and to develop "value-added" byproducts: sauces and jams from the prefecture's cornucopia of fruits; chowders, dried sardines, and animal feed from its marine life. The prefecture also publicized and marketed Oita's products. Governor Hiramatsu himself became the prefecture's preeminent salesman.

Hiramatsu complemented the "one village, one product" movement by aggressively recruiting high-tech industries to Oita and by building an infrastructure commensurate with the prefecture's growing economy. Today, Oita's flowers and mushrooms can be flown directly to markets in Tokyo—"ninety minutes fresh." And futuristic new towns called Greenpolis, Marinopolis, and Technopolis are being developed as centers for forest, marine, and high-tech industries as well as centers for research and education.

"Think globally, act locally" is a motto Hiramatsu repeatedly invokes. Oita should not become an economic appendage of Tokyo, he asserts, but a free-standing participant in the borderless economy of the globe. This is why Oita's signature products are marketed aggressively abroad and why the governor has been vigorous in promoting foreign exchange programs and special events that link its citizens to dozens of countries around the world. Moreover, for several years now Hiramatsu has been preaching the benefits of the "one village, one product" system to local governments near and far. From Louisiana ("One parish, one product") to Fujian ("One village, one treasure"), Hiramatsu's idea is catching on.

Meanwhile, life in Oita is getting better. Unemployment is down. Incomes are up. And for Oita's young people, a good future now beckons at home. Little wonder that ever-smiling Hiramatsu has been elected governor five times running.