Life-Sized Dolls in Japanese Village as Population Declines
October 27th, 2024Via: Japan Today:
Riding his tricycle with cheerful abandon, Kuranosuke Kato is the only child in his tiny, depopulated Japanese village overrun by life-sized puppets.
The two-year-old was the first baby in two decades for Ichinono, one of more than 20,000 communities in Japan where the majority of residents are aged 65 and above, according to the internal affairs ministry data.
Revitalising rural areas is one of Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s key campaign pledges as he fights to retain a majority in a general election on Sunday.
Ishiba has called Japan’s low birth rate a “quiet emergency”, one that is starkly evident in places like Ichinono, a bucolic hamlet home to fewer than 60 people.
“If the village is left as it is now, the only thing that awaits us is extinction,” said 74-year-old Ichiro Sawayama, head of its governing body.
Many developed nations are facing the same demographic time bomb, but Japan, which allows relatively low levels of immigration, already has the world’s second-oldest population after Monaco.
Silence pervades the air in Ichinono, where residents have handcrafted stuffed mannequins to create a semblance of a bustling society.
Some puppets ride swings while others push a cart of firewood, smiling eerily at visitors.
“We’re probably outnumbered by puppets,” Hisayo Yamazaki, an 88-year-old widow, told AFP.
