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.
Yet the street appears busy, dotted with life-sized dolls that outnumber humans 10 to one, the product of a one-woman bid to counter the emptiness and loneliness felt in Nagoro, like many Japanese villages decimated by depopulation.
Nagoro has become known as the “valley of dolls” after resident Tsukimi Ayano began placing scarecrows on the street to inject some life into her depopulated village.
Photo: AFP
“Only 27 people live in this village, but the number of scarecrows is 10-fold, like 270,” the 69-year-old doll maker said in an interview at her home.
It all started 16 years ago, when Ayano created a scarecrow dressed in her father’s clothes to prevent birds from eating 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 said.
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.
The skillful craftswoman needs only three days to make an adult-sized doll that are now scattered all around the village.
The secret to breathing life into the dolls? Applying pink color to the lips and cheeks with a makeup brush, Ayano said.
At the local school, she has placed 12 colorful child-sized dolls at desks, positioned as if part of a lively class.
The school closed seven years ago as there was no one left to teach, she said.
“Now there are no children. The youngest person here is 55 years old,” she added.
Down the street, a “family” of scarecrows lounges in front of an abandoned grocery store, while a doll dressed as an old farmer window-shops next door.
While never humming with people, Ayano remembered that Nagoro used to be a well-to-do place with about 300 residents and workers, supported by the forestry industry and dam construction work.
Nagoro’s plight is replicated all around Japan as it battles a declining population, low birthrate and high life expectancy.
The nation is on the verge of becoming the first “ultra-aged” country in the world, meaning that 28 percent of people are to be 65 or older.
A government report showed that 27.7 percent of the population of 127 million — one in four people — are aged 65 or older and the figure is expected to jump to 37.7 percent in 2050.
According to experts, about 40 percent of Japan’s 1,700 municipalities are defined as “depopulated.”
After World War II, when forestry and agriculture were the main economic drivers, many Japanese lived in rural villages such as Nagoro, but young people started to leave for Tokyo in the 1960s, Japan Research Institute economist Takumi Fujinami said.
Japanese 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 said.
“To combat depopulation, we need people moving in to depopulated areas, but recovering the population is extremely difficult,” he said. “Instead, it’s important to increase income or improve working conditions for young people in rural areas.”
For example, companies in rural areas tend to have fewer holidays than those in Tokyo, he said.
“We need to create communities where young people can make a long-term living,” Fujinami said.
While there is little evidence of citizens returning to Nagoro, Ayano’s dolls have attracted flesh-and-blood people from as far afield as the US and France.
“Before I started making scarecrows, nobody stopped by. Now many people visit here,” she said. “I hope Nagoro will become lively again and many people come here for sightseeing.”
“I don’t know what Nagoro will look like in 10 or 20 years... but I’ll keep on making dolls,” she added.
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