How Japan is trying to solve the problem of shrinking villages

0:01NPR

0:11This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darian Woods. And I'm here with Anthony Kuhn, NPR's international correspondent in Seoul, South Korea. Welcome to the show, Anthony. Hi, good to be here. Darian, I'm going to give you a glimpse into our possible future today, one that Japan and other countries in East Asia like China and South Korea are already facing. Their populations are aging and shrinking, and that makes it hard to grow their economies. And we've covered aging workforces before on The Indicator, but your reporting trip to the most aged village in the world's most aged country really brought these issues into focus.

0:48Yes, I visited the village of Nanmoku. It's a little hamlet built on both sides of a river, which you're hearing, and a two-lane road that runs through the lush green mountains of Gunma Prefecture, about 80 miles northwest of Tokyo. I would love to have joined you, but instead I sat here and learned a bunch of facts, including that aging and depopulation are seen in Japan as this national crisis that's already affecting many aspects of life in Japan. It's threatening continued economic stagnation, labor shortages, and difficulty in caring for the growing number of elderly. Yes, so today on the show, we're going to zero in on rural depopulation in Japan.

1:25And the tiny village of Nanmoku is one of Japan's most closely watched cases in its decades-long struggle to deal with this issue.

1:38This message comes from Vanguard. Capturing value in the bond market is not easy. That's why Vanguard offers a suite of over 80 institutional quality bond funds, actively managed by a 200-person global team of sector specialists, analysts, and traders. They're designed for financial advisors looking to give their clients consistent results year in and year out. See the record at Vanguard.com slash audio. That's Vanguard.com slash audio. All investing is subject to risk. Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor. Support for NPR and the following message come from Edward Jones. A rich life isn't always a straight line.

2:20Unexpected turns can bring new possibilities. With 100 years of experience navigating ups and downs, Edward Jones can help guide you. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones, member SIPC. This message comes from NPR sponsor Veeam. AI promised intelligence, but it also exposed everything people couldn't see, like scattered data and hidden risks. Now there's a new way forward where protection, governance, and AI trust move together. With Veeam plus Security AI, you can see your entire data estate in real time. Because when resilience, security, governance, and AI trust come together, innovation moves safely and faster.

3:03Learn more about accelerating safe AI at scale at veem.com. So in Nanmoku, two-thirds of the village's residents are over age 65. Many of its buildings look old and weather-beaten, and there's not much new construction. Now, back in 1955, it was home to 11 ,000 people. Today, there are less than 1 ,500. So, Darian, you don't need to be a math whiz to see where things are headed. And at that rate of decline, the village could vanish from the map before long, and so could many others. By one recent calculation, Japan could lose about 40 % of its municipalities over the next century as the countryside depopulates.

3:44That's more than 740 cities and towns. Yes, but the Nanmoku village government is not planning to go down without a fight. Saijo Hasegawa is the village mayor, and he told me that he aims to stabilize the population in the next 15 to 20 years.

4:04By then, the village's population is expected to be around 800, about half its current size. We believe we'll be able to keep it at that level from then on. A baby boom is just not in the cards for this village, so he plans to use central and local government funds as financial incentives to lure young people to the village. Japan's government is already offering families about$6 ,800 per child to relocate from greater Tokyo to areas outside of major cities, including Nanmoku. There's also an additional amount for people who move to these areas and either start a business there or work for a local small or medium-sized company.

4:44And there actually have been some takers. I spoke to several young Japanese who've made the move to Nanmoku and brought with them a lot of energy and entrepreneurial spirit. One was Satomi Oigawa. She's a 25-year-old who moved to Nanmoku from Tokyo two years ago after graduating from college. And she told me that she felt life in Tokyo just didn't really suit her. I felt like my relations with people in Tokyo were too shallow and broad. So from a young age, I really wanted to live in the countryside. To me, Satomi really seemed to be enjoying integrating into the village society and meeting people, and her job helps her to do that.

5:24Like many parts of rural Japan, Nanmoku has a lot of abandoned houses, and her job working for the village government is to match these houses with potential new residents. So I followed Satomi around the village as she did her job, and she went up onto a mountainside to visit a farmer named Hachiro Koganizawa, and he was tending to his vegetables and flowers, and he said he's thinking of retiring, but he hasn't done it yet. This man looks like he's in his mid-70s. In fact, he's 91 years old. That is something to aspire to. You know, looking a quarter century younger than his real age, what's his secret?

6:01Yeah, that's what I was thinking. And here's what Hachiro told me.

6:08Because of the farmer's spirit, we don't retire. That spirit that we work until we die has been planted in us for generations. Okay, that sounds like the special sauce. And is it safe to say a lot of the folks you spoke to share this farmer's attitude? Oh, absolutely. There was a 2018 survey which suggests that Nanmoku's elderly residents are stronger physically and cognitively than their counterparts elsewhere in Japan. And besides keeping working and eating healthy, they try to stay socially active and visit their neighbors often. Of course, there are quite a few elderly Nanmoku residents in nursing homes, but the ones you see on the street really look quite vigorous.

6:49And as for these transplants, they need to stay five years to get the government subsidies, or they'll have to give the money back. And some stay, but others end up leaving because their business ideas don't pan out, or they find village life wasn't what they had hoped for. Yeah, that's right. I spoke to a 29-year-old resident named Yuta Sato, who moved to Nanmoku some six years ago, and he told me that not everyone in the village actually welcomes newcomers like himself. Some people say that instead of throwing money around to attract immigrants, they should spend it on the people already living in the village.

7:26He's got a daughter, but the village has no other kids or age, so he's worried that she'll have no classmates in school. And the nearest hospital is an hour's drive away. He originally thought he would grow old and retire here. Now he's not even sure the village will survive that long. This program is just part of the Japanese government's larger efforts to deal with rural depopulation. The government has spent billions of dollars over the last 30 years. And this effort to entice young families to vanishing villages is just one local example. Yeah, polls show that most Japanese have been pretty pessimistic about the government's efforts to turn around the country's population decline.

8:06Turning things around would require drastic reforms, and specifically, a lot of money that many people would not be willing to cough up. I spoke to a sociologist named Masahiro Yamada at Chuo University in Tokyo about this. I'm worried that Japanese people would prefer to accept a declining birth rate, and everyone gradually equally getting poorer, other than accepting a big change, which causes some people to lose out. The most likely people to lose out are senior citizens. They currently get most of the welfare benefits, and they represent the nation's largest voting bloc. Government programs to stem population decline might take funding away from them.

8:45But accepting that gradual population decline doesn't leave much of a future for remote settlements like Namoku. Japan's population dropped by more than 800 ,000 people last year. Its population of 125 million is predicted to halve by the century's end. And Japan's not allowing large-scale immigration, so it's not clear where people would come from to repopulate rural areas. Right, and some Japanese question the seemingly futile effort to slow population decline. They argue that instead Japan should take depopulation as an opportunity to address the world's environmental crisis. I spoke to Peter Matanly, a Japan expert at the University of Sheffield in England, and he shares this view.

9:29I would urge the Japanese government and as many Japanese people as possible to consider the idea that it might be a good thing for Japan to deliberately abandon a lot of these places and to initiate a radical revolution in terms of land use patterns in Japan in rural areas. So there's not a lot of discussion of this yet, but what he's suggesting is allowing nature to reclaim these aging, shrinking settlements like Nanmoku and using them to store carbon in forests and let bears, deer and wild boars roam free. That's wild. Yeah, well, technically that's rewilding. Got it. But yeah, that would be a pretty radical shift.

10:14This episode was produced by Julia Ritchie and Chie Kobayashi with engineering by James Willits was fact-acted by Sarah Juarez Cake & Cannon edits the show and The Indicator is a production of NPR