21 ms·
Japan's abandoned villages
- kqr2 3y agoThis article kind of reminds me about the opening scene in Spirited Away with the abandoned amusement park.
- nico 3y agoI kept reading thinking they were going to mention it… but no Still very interesting article, the pictures aren’t super good, but reading about the way human society evolves is very much so
- toomuchtodo 3y agoFor anyone in Japan or with domain knowledge, what are the logistics for acquiring and taking up residence in an abandoned village (assuming you can legally reside in Japan of course)? EDIT: Thank you all for the replies!
- civilitty 3y agoYou can take a look at AkiyaBanks: https://www.akiyabanks.com/ https://www.akiyabanks.com/ It's a directory of municipality-specific sites and pages with lots of links to cheap akiyas, subsidy programs, and Google translations of pages for English readers. Many municipalities/prefectures have akiya matching programs where you send them what you want and they help find a house within your budget. Getting one is really easy since there are millions of empty homes but the logistics of maintaining these houses is a whole other matter. Be prepared to do most of the work yourself because a lot of these akiyas are rarely in areas with plenty of craftsmen and construction workers.
- tomohelix 3y agoBuying one isn't hard. They are quite cheap. A completely broken house like the ones in the OP is probably begging to be sold. A 2k+ sqft livable house in the suburb of Tokyo is about $300k. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/17/realestate/japan-empty-houses.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/17/realestate/japan-empty-ho... https://archive.is/BDCnm https://archive.is/BDCnm But these are traditional Japanese houses so quite a lot of renovation is needed to bring it up to a Westerner's standards. Still, all in all, if you are fine with living in a backwater village with barely any modern conveniences then 200-300k for a big house is not too bad. Assuming you can speak Japanese and don't mind the xenophobia...
- exhilaration 3y agoFYI for those passing by, that New York Times article above is fantastic, I was about to post it as well.
- layer8 3y agoIt was discussed a couple months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35606413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35606413
- Macha 3y agoSo a 2k sqft house here, in my European country, would be considered quite a large one, and my understanding is Japanese standards for housing sizes trend even smaller than here. I realise it's commonplace in parts of the USA, but you're likely paying a premium for getting a house that the market considers "oversized". Wikipedia seems to indicate that 1000 sqft is the average in Tokyo.
- resolutebat 3y agoTokyo is extremely dense and land is very expensive. The mountainous rural backblocks that contain these abandoned properties is not, and land is essentially worthless or negative value: it has no productive use, but you still need to pay taxes. This is in fact a big reason why Japan has a big problem with abandoned rural property: there is no incentive for next of kin to sort out the inheritance paperwork, and then it's left in limbo.
- srvmshr 3y agoFrom an earlier post, copying my answer which seems relevant to your query > Being a Japanese resident (PR) now, I did look up this option for a summer home in the woods (Akita, Aichi-ken etc). This is what I learnt: * Akiya houses come with an agreement to reside. Not just be a summer home. Their goal is to repopulate the countryside. * You have to cultivate any farmland that comes with the deed. You cannot sell it without special permission. There is a whole lot of paperwork to deal with such situations. * Most old Akiya will have strong regulation not to change the frontage significantly. It isn't permitted. Architecturally these changes have to be consistent with the older house and rest of the community. Building permits are very stringent. (Basically, you can't build a sprawling European villa in a Japanese countryside for e.g., even if land wasn't a concern.) * Land tax is levied the day from purchase - not from the day of moving in. (This could pinch given that time to renovate can be 1-2 years in remote places, and taxes aren't cheap necessarily) * Residents have to contribute to local development funds which take care of Matsuris etc. You like it or not, local government will knock on your door with a bill. * Connectivity is poor. Cell reception outside NTT can be spotty. Internet is even harder. * Language proficiency is a must. No one speaks English. Not even the local government officials. * House will need a significant amount of renovation. With the stringent restrictions - anywhere between 100 & 200 grand (depending on the disrepair)
- crooked-v 3y agoThat seems like a very "wanting to have your cake and eat it too" setup on the part of the local municipalities. 'No summer homes' seems like an easy way for many of them to get no people at all, especially since the country as a whole has very good housing policy and so doesn't have the same kind of home affordability crisis as the US.
- renewiltord 3y agoIt looks like their order of preferences is: Repopulate by old standards > take the L > become vacation community I don't think it's "wanting to have your cake and eat it too" so much as it being the same as sometimes I want something done but not if it costs too much. In that case, having it not done is better than paying too much for it.
- nataz 3y agoWhile there are a fair share disposable/modern style abandoned houses, there are also these incredible traditional style properties. While I understand some of the underlying reasons, I'm still shocked that they are just allowed to sit there falling apart. Part of me wants to spec out deconstruct/container/ship to the US for for rebuild. Obviously it's not economically feasible, but some of them are that interesting.
- Ekaros 3y agoI think it really comes to what is common in place and what is not. Like Detroit had plenty of homes. And many of them were left to rot. As they had no value or even negative value. It is same all around the world in these dying communities. They might be exotic from outside, but there is just too many of them in those places.
- rgrieselhuber 3y agoWhen I first started traveling in Japan, the dilapidated countryside was very disconcerting to me, almost felt like I'd stumbled into some sort of back room. The more time I spent there, however, the more I came to appreciate the aesthetics of the lonely restaurants, the rusted steel-sided buildings, almost abandoned shrines, etc. Hard to say what exactly is so appealing about it, but it sticks with you.
- andromaton 3y agoCould it be the quiet and calmness?
- rgrieselhuber 3y agoIt reminds me of the forest passage concept described by Ernst Jünger. He was writing about sovereignty within one's own consciousness and I'm not referencing this particular context in this case (although they probably are related) but more generally how "the hinterlands" provide a place away from the beam of focus that a society maintains. Almost by definition these places feel forgotten but once you get over the unnerving sense of separation and isolation from everything, your imagination seems to recover some of its creativity. That creativity then fills in the gaps visually to create an aesthetically pleasing setting even if it didn't feel that way at first.
- andromaton 3y agoI felt this calmness in Iceland and in bush country in Alaska in December.
- opportune 3y agoIME it’s not just the quiet and calmness. There’s few children and families (mostly elderly folks), what few people there are mostly keep to themselves and won’t initiate conversation with you, and abandoned places are left to degrade without being vandalized or littered with trash. There are roads and shrines that are still maintained but most likely empty when you visit. There’s nothing, and very little even “regular abandoned stuff” like broken glass or boarded up windows, to make you feel on-edge or unsafe.
- ip26 3y agoOne such place is described as having been ‘about ten houses’, which isn’t quite what I imagined when they said ‘villages’.
- nradov 3y agoHamlet?
- Prickle 3y agoJapanese doesn't really have separate words to denote villages by their size. There is only City, Town and Village. (市町村) And you would really only say "Small Village" or "Big Village", etc. The legal requirements are based on population, and vary by prefecture. So this is likely a translation issue.
- nataz 3y agoIf you are interested in buying an abandoned home in the Japan countryside highly recommend the YouTube channel Tokyo Llama. He's spent the last four years renovating a beautiful traditional style Japanese house and property about an hour outside of Tokyo. He talks about the renovation aspects, taxes, paperwork process, and the pros and cons of doing this with a family. Lots of videos the watch. https://youtu.be/TwRjO3kHxU4?si=a9rw7FbwpiXEQLjr https://youtu.be/TwRjO3kHxU4?si=a9rw7FbwpiXEQLjr
- princevegeta89 3y agoUnless you're Japanese or half-Japanese I wouldn't really recommend that - The Japanese culture is known for being a closed sort where people from anywhere else in the world are only always considered "visitors" and never ever one of their own.
- hadlock 3y agoThis is true of any neighbors over the age of about 60 in my california neighborhood and none of them are of any particular ethnicity.
- princevegeta89 3y agoI was referring to the entire country, not just a specific neighborhood or city
- zenlot 3y agoThat's current situation in UK, and way less in Japan.
- FigurativeVoid 3y agoI find a lot of people that say something like this, especially Americans, they totally ignore the colonial history and how poorly the Japanese were (and still are) treated by Americans and other outsiders. They may be closed off, I don’t know. But I don’t think it’s some cultural trait.
- cyberax 3y agoThis is the inevitable result of thoughtless densification. People _have_ to move into denser cities, because they are the only places with jobs. This in turn results in more and more jobs moving into denser cities. And people have to live in ever-smaller apartments.
- smadge 3y agoCities are the engines of the modern economy. We can revert to an agrarian society if you please, but not without consequences.
- tomcam 3y agoI can’t see where GP said anything about reverting to an agrarian society. Was the post edited?
- cyberax 3y agoCities are the engines of the early 20-th century economy. The modern economy is much better served by people living in comfortable suburban locations. Work from home and cars enable that.
- kibwen 3y agoThe modern economy is much better served by people living in comfortable locations that are walkable rather than requiring a wasteful car to merely live. (American-style) suburbs will never be the engine of anything, they're neither agriculturally productive like rural areas nor as economically efficient as urban areas.
- midoridensha 3y agoOn top of that, the car requirement is in effect a gigantic tax: every person has to pay tens of thousands of dollars just to own a car, and many thousands to tens of thousands every year to operate and insure and maintain it. And that's a direct tax on every person. Then there's the maintenance costs for all the roadways needed to support all these cars, all the parking lots to park them in, etc. All that comes out of either direct taxes on people, or an indirect tax in the form of higher prices. Finally, this doesn't even consider the climate consequences of everyone driving around in a 6000-pound SUV; all these cars spewing emissions are turning those suburbs into very *un*comfortable locations with deadly heat waves. But good luck getting any Americans like the OP to understand any of this.
- RajT88 3y agoThis reminds me of the abandoned village in one of the 'Scorpion' movies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_Convict_Scorpion:_Jailhouse_41 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_Convict_Scorpion:_Jailh... It appeared to be abandoned because of volcanic activity. Super cool. Not sure if real village or just a set.
- ptelomere 3y agoLiving here for more than a decade, spent first five years just working myself to death. Then I managed to finally settle, bought a car and started exploring the country. The difference between Tokyo/Osaka/Nagoya and the country-side is stark. I don't think that's a bad thing, "Abandon" is the wrong word, we simply "return" the land we no longer use to nature. We only borrowed it in the first place anyway. As for making cities more crowded, I don't think that's a bad thing either. Tokyo is pretty nice, you can pretty much get whatever you need within walking distance, I lived there for 5 years before I had a car, and I explored the city and its every corner within that 5 years on foot, bicycles, trains and buses, never felt any inconviniences.
- totetsu 3y agoYes we return anything too expensive to dispose of by official routes to nature too, old fluorescent light bulbs, car tires, microwaves, old micro vans, …
- npteljes 3y agoAbandon is a good word, because the return you describe seems to be passive. Many of the abandoned sites have lots of belongings left behind, with no sign of active clean-up effort. Since the intention that can be read from the signs is "leaving", the act is best described as "abandoning".
- ertian 3y agoThis is tangential: I was back home at my parents' place last Christmas: a small town in rural Canada. They have a bit of a library, and I was flipping through some books before bed. I picked up a tome from one of the shelves: I remembered it from my childhood, but I'd never thought about it much. The title was "<community_name>". It suddenly struck me as strange. Why did this little town (pop. ~600) need a great big heavy 800-page volume to document it's history? How much was there to say? So I started flipping through it...and it was a bit surreal. The 1927 brass band? How the hell did they have 30 members? A hotrod club? How many churches _were_ there? Parades crowding the main street? A movie theatre--with lines out the door--and a drive-in theatre? Wait...what's this giant brick building? A high school? I've never seen this building in my life! ...And then I started thinking of the big old brick town hall, torn down when I was still a little kid. And the shopping mall place I halfway-remembered, like it was a dream, with the various clothing stores and the shoe store and the donut shop and the ice cream counter, that burned down shortly after... It's hard to square those memories with the ~100 houses scattered around the lone grocery store, gas station, and bargain shop that exist today. These seemed like pictures from a vibrant little town many times the size (and before Amazon and Walmart drove all the shops out of business). It didn't make sense that such a tiny little place could have this much history! Talked about it with my dad, and he pointed out what should have been obvious: 100 years ago, a square mile of land would have supported somewhere between 4 to 8 families--and families were bigger in those days. You might be talking dozens of people. Today, one family (with the typical 1.43 kids) can farm several square miles of land. The countryside used to be _dense_ with farming families orbiting this little town, coming in to buy food and clothing, catch a movie, hang out at the donut shop, cruise the strip...practice with the brass band. The same was true for all the other little clusters-of-houses-passing-for-towns in the area, and across the countryside. The lucky ones have shrunk to a fraction of their original size and lost almost all their businesses. The rest are just gone, a couple picturesque abandoned houses on the horizon. My point being: we (meaning the US & Canada) are at the tail end of this same process ourselves. We've just been at it a little longer, and our roots were less deep in the beginning.the donut shop and the ice cream counter, that burned down shortly after... It's hard to square those memories with the ~100 houses scattered around the lone grocery store, gas station, and bargain shop that exist today. These seemed like pictures from a vibrant little town many times the size (and before Amazon and Walmart drove all the shops out of business). It didn't make sense that such a tiny little place could have this much history! Talked about it with my dad, and he pointed out what should have been obvious: 100 years ago, a square mile of land would have supported somewhere between 4 to 8 families--and families were bigger in those days. You might be talking dozens of people. Today, one family (with the typical 1.43 kids) can farm several square miles of land. The countryside used to be _dense_ with farming families orbiting this little town, coming in to buy food and clothing, catch a movie, hang out at the donut shop, cruise the strip...practice with the brass band. The same was true for all the other little clusters-of-houses-passing-for-towns in the area, and across the countryside. The lucky ones have shrunk to a fraction of their original size and lost almost all their businesses. The rest are just gone, a couple picturesque abandoned houses on the horizon. My overall point being: we (meaning the US & Canada) are at the tail end of this same process ourselves. We've just been at it a little longer, and our roots were less deep in the beginning.