Opinion of municipal mergers in Japan

[TML]

Over the past 200 years or so, many municipalities in Japan have merged to create larger, more populous municipalities. Back in 1868, when the Meiji era began, Japan had over 70,000 municipalities across the country; today, it has just over 1,700. The Japanese government eventually wants to reduce the total number of municipalities in the country to 1,000 even, although it has not set a specific deadline for accomplishing this. The main reasons given for such mergers is to make subsidies from the federal government more efficiently distributed to local governments.

What do you guys think of this policy?

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

1,000 municipalities sounds too low, but I think this makes sense thus far.