The city’s services have been cut to the bone, and the public work force of about 300 has been cut by half. Yubari’s winter festivals have been canceled, its public bath closed and its six elementary schools consolidated into one. The aftermath of the March 2011 tsunami further decimated local tourism.

Yubari cut back on its snow-clearing, and its treasured art museum collapsed under the weight of the accumulated snow. There was no money to rebuild.

Even the growers of the region’s famed cantaloupe melon, which can sell for almost $100 each, are struggling as a younger generation has left farms behind for better jobs elsewhere. Meanwhile, the handful of companies still here complain of a dearth of workers; all but 4 of the 20 employees at the Yubari Tsumura pharmaceutical plant commute from outside the city.

“Something needed to be done to stop the bleeding,” said Shizuo Shibata, 77, a retired school district worker who has spent his whole life in Yubari. “But anyone who had prospects is leaving.”

It was into these depths of despair that Mr. Suzuki, then a 26-year-old public servant in the city of Tokyo’s social welfare department, was dispatched to Yubari on a yearlong loan from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government.

By all accounts here, he quickly established rapport with the locals, volunteering his free time to help resuscitate the city’s annual film festival and checking in regularly with his elderly neighbors. (Mr. Suzuki concedes he had little else to do during the long winter evenings.) At the same time, the city’s younger people came to consider him a generational leader. Mr. Suzuki began to advocate a new way of thinking in Yubari: what if the city could do more to safeguard the most essential public services, while negotiating better terms on its debt repayments with the central government?

He began a door-to-door survey to get a better grasp of how the city’s cuts were affecting living standards. He also pushed for the city to set up regular three-way meetings with the central government and the prefecture of Hokkaido, to discuss Yubari’s debt repayments.