On the narrow main road in the Japanese mountain village of Nanmoku, about 80 miles northwest of the capital, Tokyo, a street sign warns drivers to watch out for older people crossing the street.
Workers in town, from road maintenance crews to the shopkeeper at the gift shop, appear well past traditional retirement age.
In the oldest country in the world, Nanmoku is known as the oldest village. More than two-thirds of its roughly 1,500 residents are over age 65.
A night-time drive through town reveals the glut of abandoned houses.
“The houses with people living in them have lights on,” said Satomi Oigawa, the village migration coordinator, through an interpreter. “Houses without lights are [abandoned].”
The junior high school in town was shuttered in March, and the students shifted to the elementary school building. Twenty students study there now, and high schoolers have to travel outside the village.
When Nanmoku was incorporated in 1955, it housed more than 10,000 people.
“When I was a child, there were a lot of people in the village, a lot of people worked in forestry,” lifelong resident Takayo Ichikawa, 75, remembered. “It was bustling, it was a fun time to be living here.”
The once-thriving forestry and agricultural sectors in Nanmoku started shedding jobs years ago. National trends, including low birthrates and a migration of young people to the country’s larger cities, have driven down the population.
“Now,” she said, “I feel lonely sometimes because there aren’t many people here.”
Nanmoku’s government is trying to keep the village alive by attracting new, younger residents.
The mayor has opened two new nursing homes in recent years, partly to provide jobs for working-age people. Young people can also do three-year stints in Nanmoku in a government community revitalization corps.
“All of Japan’s population is shrinking, so it’s unrealistic to think we could increase the population of just this village,” said Jin Takayanagi, who’s part of a three-person team within the village government tasked with attracting new residents.
Instead, Takayanagi said the village is just trying to reduce the average age from more than two-thirds over 65 to about 40%.
“If we have children, young adults and seniors, we’ll have three generations working together, and our village can survive,” Takayanagi said.
Nanmoku, like other Japanese municipalities, is advertising its abandoned houses online to attract buyers interested in cheap properties. It’s Satomi Oigawa’s job to connect with people who express interest in those homes and show them properties they might be interested in. She also plays up the considerable natural beauty of Nanmoku, including a deep gorge where the Nanmoku River cascades in a frothy waterfall.
“It’s very rich in nature and [has] very friendly people,” Oigawa said, standing beside the waterfall.
One of Oigawa’s success stories is Manna Kobayashi, a 20-something-year-old who’d been living in a nearby city and found out about Nanmoku after doing a Google search for old houses in the prefecture. She wanted to open a short-term vacation rental and landed on a well-maintained traditional Japanese house in Nanmoku.
“I came here and found out I really like it,” she said.
Kobayashi decorated the house with a mixture of traditional and modern touches and started renting it out in December.
“It’s really fun to live here,” she said. “You have a lot of human interaction that you don’t get in the cities. Like, neighbors always come to visit me or teach me how to grow vegetables. That kind of thing is always happening here.”
The village even fixed up the kitchen in Kobayashi’s rental.
“Most of our abandoned homes need renovations,” said village official Jin Takayanagi. “Renovations cost money, and we want to attract young people to live here. They don’t necessarily have money. So, as a village, we renovate one to three houses per year.”
So far, efforts to attract new residents have yielded modest results. Last year, several people moved to the village, Takaynagi said, but about 100 residents died.
Takayanagi said the village has already decided not to consolidate with any nearby towns but wouldn’t guess what the future will bring for Nanmoku.
“The basic aim of our office is to keep people healthy and living happily,” he said. “That’s our goal.”
For Miyoko Asakawa, 78, life in Nanmoku is happy. She’s close with a group of women she’s been friends with for roughly half a century. They have tea together once a week, and play volleyball and softball together sometimes.
“I know a lot of people in this village, so that makes my life very rich,” she said.
Her home, a century-old wood-frame house with ceilings blackened from a traditional indoor fire pit, is emptier than it once was: It’s just her son and her there now, instead of the nine members of her extended family.
But the natural beauty of Nanmoku remains unchanged, she said, and the nightingales she can hear in her garden still sing beautifully.