Imagine moving Congress out of Washington to some small town like Fredericksburg, Va. Unthinkable as that sounds, the Japanese have just announced the end of Tokyo's role as the 200-year-old seat of government in what observers see as a major shift towards decentralization. By the year 2015 the Diet will be situated in a new small-scale capital city -- the ultimate devolution fantasy. PNS associate editor Yoichi Clark Shimatsu, editor of the Japan Times Weekly, is a Tokyo-based writer.

TOKYO -- Brazil created Brasilia from scratch three decades ago. Germany will re-anoint Berlin as its capital city by the turn of the century. Now Japan has announced plans to move its seat of government out of Tokyo by the year 2015.

But whereas Brazilians saw their new capital as a leap into modernization and the Germans see Berlin as the undisputed powerhouse of a re-emergent Middle Europe, the Japanese are moving in a different direction -- decentralization.

With little fanfare, plans are being drawn up to move the Japanese parliament, known as the Diet, to one of several obscure sites named by an advisory committee of noted scholars, bureaucrats and business executives. The two main contenders -- Nasu, a hot-springs resort, and the Abukuma hills -- are both rural areas northeast of Tokyo.

"Japan's capital has historically moved along a northeast axis from Nara to Kyoto and then to Tokyo, and this movement reflects the development of Japanese civilization," says Heita Kawakatsu, an Oxford-trained economic historian at Waseda University and an advisor to the national Land Agency, which has pushed for the capital relocation.

Kawakatsu points out that every previous move of the capital marked a new historical epoch. Current relocation plans signify the transition from mass production and social homogeneity to an information-based and individual-oriented society. For the Japanese, who are accustomed to the faceless anomie of an industrial society, such a sea change requires a leap of imagination.

Unlike futuristic Brasilia or grandiose Berlin, Japan's new capital is envisioned as a modest urban community, designed to reflect a philosophy of low-key governance. The preliminary guidelines, published in December, call for smaller government, dispersal of the ministry offices across the country, and a separation of politics from the economy. The decentralized government would still be loosely linked by the optical-fiber "information highway," scheduled for completion in 15 years. The committee also urged that the new capital city of 600,000 be designed as a network of small towns integrated within the natural environment instead of as a complex of office towers.

The social changes symbolized by the new capital are expected to extend well beyond the site of the Diet. "Concrete-block apartments separated from nature are terrible places for children to grow up," Kawakatsu observes. "Japanese families need to leave the cities and build real homes surrounded by the environment." Relatively inexpensive land is still available because much of Japan is covered by what Kawakatsu calls an uninhabited "green desert" of tree plantations.

Such a human-centered vision represents a clean break with Japan's past 130 years of top-down political decision-making and bureaucratic guidance of the economy, which have existed for as long as Tokyo has been the capital.

But the decentralization does not mean in inward-looking return to the rural past. The Land Agency has developed a master plan to subdivide Japan into four regional blocs, each closely linked with neighboring regions: southernmost Kyushu with China and Southeast Asia; the Japan Sea coast with Korea; Hokkaido and northern Honshu with the northern Pacific; and the Kanto region around Tokyo with the United States and Latin America.

If Tokyo is the loser, the loss is due primarily to its own success as a city. Founded in the 17th century by the Tokugawa shoguns as a military garrison, Tokyo was for 200 years the world's most populous city, with a brilliant commoners' culture represented in the kabuki theater, woodblock prints and illustrated books (the forerunner of manga, or comics).

But Tokyo's tremendous success as an urban community doomed it as a national capital. Every attempt by the central government to widen roads or erect magnificent new edifices provoked popular resistance from homeowners and small shopkeepers. The fight for land within the city boundaries led to skyrocketing real estate prices and expensive schemes to landfill Tokyo Bay. This economic pressure, in turn, contributed to a spiraling national deficit. At $2.4 trillion, Japan has the world's highest per capita level of public debt. Meanwhile, Tokyo became the world's most expensive city.

Will capital flight doom a now-deindustrialized and recession-bogged Tokyo? Perhaps not, thanks to its rich cultural legacy. The rest of Asia combined can hardly match Tokyo's galaxy of theaters, clubs, museums, orchestras, recording studios, universities, publishing houses, animation industry, theme parks, software companies and television networks. If prices continue to deflate, Tokyo should be able to do what it does best -- entertain and amuse crowds, this time from a more prosperous and better educated Asia-Pacific region.

At the dawn of a new century, Tokyo could emerge in a less intimidating but equally influential role -- as Asia's new cultural capital.