Waiting For The End In Japan’s Terminal Villages

MINAMIAIZU, JAPAN – 72-year-old Haga Ichio and his 66 year-old wife, Tomio Ichio, live in a dying village in Japan. Their humble two-story abode in Shionohara has been home to the Ichio family for four generations, but it may soon end with them. 

On a frigid February morning, last night’s snowfall blanketed the hamlet in a cocoon of snow. Ichio, a man of great health for his age, shoveled snow out of his driveway in slow, broad strokes. He had a snowblower, but I had suggested we shovel together—there was not much else to do for fun around the village. In the perfect white silence, one could very faintly hear the gurgling of a river nearby. 

With a population of 95, Shionohara is a hamlet nestled in the rural town of Minamiaizu in Fukushima Prefecture. 92% of the town is forest, surrounded by mountains and a picturesque river. According to government census data, Minamiazu’s population has been on a steady decline since the 1970s. More than a third of its residents have disappeared over the last forty years, dropping from 22,059 in 1995 to 15,476 in 2018. 

In 10 or 20 years, Ichio said, Shionohara “will be almost extinct”, as more people move from the rural countryside to more urban areas like Tokyo and Aizuwakamatsu. This is partly due to the exodus of workers to urban areas for better jobs and infrastructure, but another significant pressure point has been the growing elderly population in the countryside. 

“It is truly lonely that the village is disappearing, but since there are no children [left to sustain it], I think there is nothing we can do about it,” he said.

AN AGING CRISIS

Japan has the oldest population of any developed country today. One in four people are aged 65 or over, and statistics released this month by the Japanese government show that its population experienced its sharpest year-to-year decrease in 2018. By 2060, the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs projected that nearly 40% of the Japanese population will be 65 or older. 

This aging crisis has affected almost all aspects of life, from adult diaper sales exceeding baby diapers to a new holiday called “Respect for the Aged Day.” The government budget for fiscal year 2019 showed a ¥477 billion increase in social security expenditures attributable to the aging population, with total social security expenditures accounting for 34.2 percent of annual spending. But perhaps no consequence is more symbolic of this difficult era than that of the terminal village.

There are thousands of these villages—or rather technically, hamlets—dotting the Japanese countryside, according to Peter Mantanle, a Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Sheffield who studies rural depopulation in Japan. They are known as genkai shūraku, or literally, “limited villages.”

“The [government doesn’t] publicly talk about [terminal villages] because it’s obviously a very difficult issue for any community to be labeled ‘terminal,’” Mantanle said. “[But] there are now between 250-300 hamlets in Japan where 100% of the population is aged 75 or over.”

Shionohara, where Haga Ichio and his family lives, has just 95 inhabitants in 33 households, according to Ichio. Too small to stand by itself, it is considered a part of Minamiaizu, a municipality whose own website introduces it as “a town with a large area and a depopulated/aged population, but…a scenic area.” The majority of Shionohara’s residents are 60 and above, and the oldest living person currently is said to be 103, living in a nursing home nearby. 

Japan’s government is well aware of its aging crisis, and efforts have been made over the years to address its uncertain future through a variety of incentives and programs. A government-sponsored friendship program, the Kakehashi Project, took me and a cohort of other young Asian-Americans to Japan for a week in order to expose us to some of the issues Japan is facing. I stayed with Ichio and his family for three days in Shionahana, where I was able to gain a better understanding of what life is like for those living in terminal villages, and how they have become as empty as they are today.

A SLOW EXODUS 

Ichio pulled the compact silver sedan into the driveway. His house was a traditional Japanese home that featured a genkan entryway, sliding paper screen partitions, and tatami floor matting. It was small but cozy, with an ancestral shrine tucked away in a corner of the traditional washitsu room where I would sleep. Numerous black-and-white photographs, newspaper cutouts, and homemade decorations lined every wall of the home, including strings of colorful paper cranes and flowers that his wife, Tomio, would spend evenings folding.

We spent the next few days mostly snowed in indoors, shivering under electric blankets inside Ichio’s house which, like many traditional Japanese houses, had poor insulation and no central heating. Still, the Ichios made us as comfortable as they could, laying out thick bedrolls with multiple gas and electric stoves pointed toward them. During mealtime, everyone gathered around a wide, low table in the living room, sticking our legs underneath its curtained flaps, which contained a heating mechanism. 

It was over these dinners that I got to know the Ichio family. I learned that Haga and Tomio loved sake, and that Haga was an avid YouTuber who uploaded lyric videos of old Japanese ballads to his channel. We mostly communicated through the Google Translate app on my iPhone, though Haga Ichio had retained a few select phrases of English from high school.

Ichio was born in 1947 during the post-war baby boom. As a young man, he left home to go to a better school in a nearby big city, Aizuwakamatsu. He spent a few years after graduating working there and Saitama, a city near Tokyo, before returning to Minamiaizu to take up a position at the post office. Ichio met his wife shortly thereafter at a New Year’s party, and the two settled down in Shionohara, where they had two daughters. 

“When I was young, I was really busy,” he said. “There were lots of young people [in Shionodara] and it was lively.” 

But as the country modernized, things started to change. A national focus on economic growth and cultural shifts drove marriage and birth rates down, and hoards of people flocked to the big cities. Data from the World Bank shows that 92 percent of Japanese lived in an urban region in 2017, compared to 63 percent in 1960. 

Years ago, both of Ichio’s children moved away from Minamiaizu when the factories they worked for closed. His daughters now live in Koriyama and Shirakawa, two bigger cities in Japan’s Fukushima and Gifu prefectures, and come back to visit occasionally. Leaving his ancestral home was never an option for Haga Ichio, so to avoid uprooting the whole family, the grandchildren were left behind for Haga and Tomio to raise. 

“I could not leave because I love this house,” Haga Ichio said simply.

Nowadays his grandchildren, Ayaka and Toshki, spend countless hours a day watching videos of their favorite K-pop band, BTS, in the living room. There are no other young people in the village to hang out with, so they spend a lot of time at home, particularly in the winter months. They commute to a nearby town for school, where Ayaka will be graduating this year. 

“Sometimes I feel lonely, but now I have a smartphone,” Ayaka said. 

I asked them if they wanted to move away from Minamiazu once they finished school. Toshki, flicking his eyes up briefly from the game bursting on his phone screen, gave a quick nod. He wanted to go to Tokyo and work in business there. The city air is dirty, he said, but there are lots of things to do. 

Ayaka said she did not want to leave. “I like to take care of people and I am taking care of my grandpa and grandma,” she told me. “Nature is beautiful, and Tokyo is scary.” 

ABANDONED LAND, GHOST HOUSES

On my last day, we took a walk around Shionohara. Nearly everything was covered by snow, but I could see how beautiful the village must be in the spring. The mountains looked like a composite of hundreds of inky brushstrokes in the distance. As we crossed over a bridge, I could see the thick grey bodies of fish swimming slowly in the water and, further downstream, two spot-billed ducks adrift. 

We paused by house after house in muted shades of blue and yellow. Ichio estimated that 15% of them were abandoned, but the number looked even higher to me. Inhabited houses had cars resting in their driveways and strings of dried daikon hanging from window ledges. The unoccupied houses were boarded up with wooden planks stapled neatly over doors and windows, and dead shrubbery overgrown in the yard. They didn’t look derelict yet—just empty.

An estimated 13.6% of all houses in Japan are abandoned. While this too can be pinned on depopulation, Japanese housing stock is also unusual in that it depreciates in value over time. According to the Guardian, many are poorly designed so they can be torn down every 20-30 years, which results in people either razing their houses or buying newly built homes rather than purchase a previously lived-in residence. Additional superstitions about homes where past occupants have died “lonely deaths” prevent homeowners from successively living in houses.

In terminal villages like Shionohara, these growing ranks of abandoned abodes are known as “akira,” or ghost houses. Aging farmers leave behind scores of houses that have no identifiable inheritors or willing buyers, surrounded by pockets of active land that prevent the government from taking ownership and rewilding the area. Thus, the land becomes simultaneously neglected and ecologically unproductive. 

“When land becomes abandoned, local authorities don’t know who owns it,” Mantanle said. “People don’t want to claim the land because there’s no resale value and they have to pay taxes on it.”

The Nomura Research Institute estimates that one third of all houses in Japan will become vacant by 2033. In efforts to combat this glut, some towns have started free housing campaigns, listing houses for free or very cheap on “akira bank” websites. One posting from May advertised four free houses up for grabs in Nagasaki City, while another one listed a property in Kitsuki City on sale for just $150, though the description warned that “to be clear, the condition of the house is not good.” 

Mantanle believes that if local authorities were somehow able to re-wild the abandoned land, or begin the process of making it productive again, that this would be the best option. As for the empty houses, and the terminal villages themselves, there seems to be no clear solution for how to get people to stay.

“It’s a serious issue,” he said. “I don’t know how the government can intervene in a significant way.”

AS TIME PASSES BY

Over the years, the Japanese government has tried every kind of plan over the years to prop up its aging society. It has implemented fertility campaigns encouraging women to have more babies, piloted egg-freezing and IVF programs, and floated laws promoting the immigration of healthcare workers. At the local level, Minamiaizu’s government is trying to boost its economy by promoting tourism in the area, highlighting its natural resources and ski lodges. 

However, Mantanle questions whether depopulation is inherently bad for the country. Urbanization seems inevitable alongside economic development, and a smaller population could mean less resource expenditure. The problem is not necessarily that rural areas are disappearing, but the way in which an aging population has intersected it. 

Japan is not alone in its struggle. According to one analysis, 33 other countries have a similar or even lower fertility rate, which means that sooner or later, the rest of the world will also need to grapple with how to take care of their own super-aged societies. If Japan manages to do things right, Mantanle believes the country could be used as a model for other Asian countries in decades to come.

“It’s going to happen in all of these countries,” he said. “Maybe we can use Japan as an opportunity to think through how Japan can lead the rest of Asia into a steady state economy.”

When it came time for me to leave the village, the entire Ichio family accompanied me to Minamiazu town hall where I boarded a bus that would take me to a train back to Tokyo. In the days after I left Japan, Ayaka Ichio would send me a message through Instagram—a screenshot of a paragraph of Japanese text processed through Google Translate. “Good morning! I am at a pre-practice practice of graduation ceremony today! Tomorrow is my graduation ceremony. It is very lonely.”

It’s July now, and Haga Ichio still posts karaoke sing-alongs and covers of his old songs every couple of days to YouTube. One of his recent uploads was a 1975 ballad by Kenji Sawada, “As Time Passes By,” with the following refrain:

Entrusting our bodies to the passage of time

Men and women drift along 

We might be happier if we fell 

This post first appeared on Forbes.com. To see the original, click here.