Once a year in late summer, the sleepy mountainous village of Nanmoku comes alive for a 400-year-old fire festival. Local people swing rings of burning straw over the Nanmoku river, which cuts through a forested valley dotted with weather-beaten traditional houses, some abandoned. Once the fires are winked out and tourists depart, the loudest sound in the village is the gushing river and chirping of birds.
A 90-minute drive from Tokyo, Nanmoku sprawls over an area roughly the size of Dublin city, but just 1,348 people live here and over two-thirds are 65 or older, making it the greyest village in the greyest society on the planet. While farmers work the local fields into their 80s and 90s and the oldest person here is over 100, there are years when not a single baby is born. A new joint primary and secondary school has just 16 children.
Nanmoku was plucked from national obscurity in 2014 by an alarming report on Japan’s emptying countryside. The village topped a list of 896 municipalities – nearly half in Japan – facing extinction by 2040 because of population decline and the migration of young people to big cities. The report said women leave rural areas in greater numbers because of lack of opportunities, carrying with them the potential for the next generation.
Japan was the first modern country to begin sustained depopulation in 2010. Its natural population has shrunk for the last 19 years and there are now four million fewer Japanese people than there were in the 2015 national census. The pace is accelerating: last year, the country lost 918,000 people – three times the population of Cork City – with 1.59 million deaths far exceeding 671,000 births.
Once seen as an outlier, as so often Japan was just a few steps in advance of the world. In Asia, the populations of China, South Korea and Taiwan have also started to shrink. In 2014, it was Europe’s turn: Italy began to depopulate first, followed by Spain, Portugal, Poland and others. Academics call them “depopulation vanguard countries” because of their role in helping us understand the possible consequences.
The consequences in villages like Nanmoku are existential. The village’s population peaked at about 10,000 in the 1950s with a thriving economy built on timber, silk and konjac, a type of yam used in Japanese food. But the industries dried up and the young left. Services have dwindled and there are too few care workers for the elderly. Mayor Saijo Hasegawa reckons the population could settle at about 800 by 2040, but only it if can bring in new blood.
Satomi Oigawa moved to Nanmoku from Tokyo and works for the local government, trying to lure people to the village and match them with abandoned houses. A handful of younger couples have relocated, helped by a government grant. A nagging issue is house ownership. “Many people don’t complete the inheritance process of their properties, so they cannot sell them to new owners even if they’re vacant,” she says.
Ogawa loves the village and says Nanmoku’s most attractive feature is its natural beauty, and support for child-rearing. It costs almost nothing to educate kids. The school has special education classes and free excursions around the country.
But population decline is accelerating as the number of women who can have children also declines, says Peter Matanle, an expert on demography in Asia and honorary senior research fellow at Sheffield University in the UK. “Changing those dynamics will be impossible without significant migration.”
In desperation, the village has begun looking overseas. The mayor puts his hopes in a sister-city agreement signed last year with Belen in Peru, on the gateway to the Amazon river.
The aim is to promote cultural and tourism exchanges and ultimately attract immigrants. He says Nanmoku needs foreigners if it is to survive. “If even a small number settle here, we can keep the village going.”
Yet, not everyone here supports the plan, and there is a growing national backlash against rising immigration. Over four million foreign residents live in Japan – still just three per cent of the country’s population (the equivalent figure in Ireland is 23 per cent).
Populist political parties have run on anti-immigration programs. A recent survey by The University of Tokyo’s Institute of Social Science found that over 56 per cent of Japanese oppose accepting more foreigners.
Confusion over how to deal with shrinking Japan is reflected at the highest political levels. Former prime minister Shinzo Abe famously rejected the idea of Japan becoming a “second-tier” power because of depopulation and ageing. Rather than European-style multiculturalism, in 2015 he declared that Japan’s fertility rate could be raised to 1.8 per woman. Instead, last year it fell to 1.14.
At least Abe publicly discussed it. As The Japan Times notes, demographers anticipated the demographic crisis over 50 years ago. “Yet, the nation’s trajectory continues unabated.”
In the absence of a miraculous baby boom or politically unpopular mass immigration, a growing number of experts urge a gradual downsizing. Takao Komine, senior researcher at the Japan Center for Economic Research, a think tank, is among those calling for “smart shrink,” a strategy in which population decline is assumed and public services are consolidated and made more efficient.
Local governments are already retooling housing, transport and welfare for the elderly. Toyama city has built a light-rail transit system designed for older people and subsidises housing construction around its stations. It has heavily invested in a care centre that has helped tug people back to the city centre, raising property prices and taxes. The care centre is built on the site of a primary school that closed in 2004.
Toyama and Nanmoku are at the vanguard of what Matanle calls a “turning point in human history”. The number of over-60s in the world passed one billion in 2019. By 2050 it will be 2.1 billion, according to the World Health Organisation, and the populations of 85 countries, mostly in Europe and Asia, will be shrinking. “The global population will peak around 50 years from now, in about 2070 or so, and then decline continuously from there. There’s very little we can do about it now,” says Matanle. Everybody should be watching what happens in Japan. This is their future.