A dwindling Japanese village has found a creative way to combat loneliness amid rural depopulation and declining birth rates.
Ichinono, a community of fewer than 60 people north of Osaka, has been handcrafting life-sized dolls to serve as quiet companions. Over the years, these figures have come to populate the village, hanging from swings, riding bicycles, gathering firewood, and silently greeting their flesh-and-blood neighbors.
"We're probably outnumbered by puppets," said Hisayo Yamazaki, an 88-year-old widow, told Agence France Presse (AFP).
While children once filled most homes in Ichinono, when they grew up, they were encouraged to leave their rustic homes for the city.
"We were afraid that our sons would become unmarriageable in they remained stuck in a remote place like this, so we encouraged them to attend city colleges," Yamazaki said. "We're now paying the price."
Revitalizing rural Japan is now a central campaign pledge of Japan's newly elected Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, who is striving to keep his office after his Liberal Democratic Party lost its majority in the recent parliamentary election.
Ishiba's predecessor, Fumio Kishida, last year introduced a ¥1 million (approximately $6,500) per child incentive for families willing to relocate from the Tokyo metropolitan area to rural regions.
"If the village is left as it is now, the only thing that awaits us is extinction," village chief Ichiro Sawayama lamented.
However, there is a single bright spot in the form of youth. Kuranosuke, aged 2, became the first baby born in Ichinono in over two decades.
"We all want to love Kuranosuka. We have somebody to love now, and this is the kind of moment when people feel the happiness the most," Sawayama said.
The boy's parents, Rie, a midwife, and Toshiki, an IT consultant, moved to the village at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
"I like the countryside. Here, we can find an identity. In the city, there are a lot of rules, but here things are looser," Toshiki told the Financial Times.
Ichinono is just one of many depopulated towns in Japan, where birth rates dropped to a record-low 1.2 births per woman last year. Marriages also saw a significant decline, with only 474,717 recorded—a 6-percent drop from 2022 and the lowest number since the end of World War II, according to Japan's health ministry.
Former Health Minister Keizo Takemi described the demographic situation as "extremely critical," cautioning that Japan has only until the 2030s to make a substantial turnaround.
Japan's super-aged society continues to gray, with 29.3 percent of its population now aged 65 or older, the highest rate of any country worldwide, according to a Japanese statistics bureau report released to mark Respect for the Aged Day on September 15.
Neighboring China, South Korea, and Taiwan face similar challenges, last year posting fertility rates of 1.0, 0.72, and 0.87, respectively.
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