In the tiny village of Nagoro, deep in the mountains of western Japan, the wind howls down a deserted street with not a living soul to be seen.
But yet the street appears busy, dotted with life-size dolls that outnumber humans. Nagoro, around 550 kilometres (340 miles) southwest of Tokyo, has been known as the valley of dolls after local resident Tsukimi Ayano began placing scarecrows on the street to inject some life into her depopulated village.
“Only 27 people live in this village but the number of scarecrows is tenfold, like 270,” the 69-year-old doll maker says.
It all started 16 years ago when the dexterous Ayano created a scarecrow dressed in her father’s clothes to prevent birds eating the seeds she had planted in her garden.
“A worker who saw it in the garden thought it really was my father … he said hello but it was a scarecrow. It was funny,” Ayano recalls.
Since then, Ayano has not stopped creating the life-size dolls, made with wooden sticks, newspapers to fill the body, elastic fabrics for skin and knitting wool for hair.
Ayano remembers as a child that Nagoro was once a well-to-do place with some 300 residents and labourers supported by the forestry industry and dam construction work.
“People gradually left … It’s lonely now,” she says. “I made more dolls as I remembered the time when the village was lively.”
Nagoro’s plight is replicated all around Japan, as the world’s third-largest economy battles a declining population, low birth rate and high life expectancy.
The country is on the verge of becoming the first “ultra-aged” country in the world, meaning that 28 per cent of people are aged 65 or above.
The latest government report shows that 27.7 per cent of a population of 127 million – one in four people – are aged 65 or older and the figure is expected to jump to 37.7 per cent in 2050.
According to experts, around 40 per cent of Japan’s 1,700 municipalities are defined as “depopulated”.
After the second world war, when forestry and agriculture were the main economic drivers, many Japanese lived in rural villages like Nagoro. But young people started to leave for Tokyo in the 1960s, says Takumi Fujinami, economist at the Japan Research Institute.
“The economy was booming in Tokyo and industrial areas at that time. They were the only places people could earn money, so a lot of young people moved there,” he says.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has pledged to revive regions outside Tokyo by pumping in tens of billions of yen, but this is not enough to stop young people from leaving their hometowns to work in Tokyo, Fujinami says.
“To combat depopulation, we need people moving in to depopulated areas,” he adds.
