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Korea and Japan also have these. The Japanese ones are covered extensively on youtube, however, my favs are by Tokyo Lens, I like his style and his voice is ver

• nojs 3y ago
  Taiwan too: https://www.twtainan.net/en/attractions/detail/4486 https://www.twtainan.net/en/attractions/detail/4486
• etrautmann 3y ago
  I was hiking in the outskirts of HK a while ago and was amazed to wander into the middle of a massive airsoft game that was being played in these abandoned villages. The players were decked out to 100% realism, where I couldn't tell that it wasn't a military exercise. Pretty surreal
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • keiranlovett 3y ago
    You just unlocked a childhood memory of my time in Hong Kong. There was an “abandoned” anti-aircraft battery on one of the mountains on the island. We would occasionally go there for airsoft games. Not fully decked out like you’re talking about (but I’ve seen those too).
• boomboomsubban 3y ago
  I assume everywhere has them, the US has tons. Some were abandoned long ago, some still have residents but are slowly dying out. I had a friend who liked to go visit them, and I went with a few times. They look like the original post, old looking on the outside and falling apart on the inside.
• throwaway4good 3y ago
  It is not really comparable. This is more like finding abandoned villages in New York city.
  • Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    City or state? Because while HK is a city, the area is not just the city but a whole "special administrative region" containing a peninsula + islands, where these pictures were taken from. Compare: https://www.atlasobscura.com/things-to-do/new-york-state/abandoned https://www.atlasobscura.com/things-to-do/new-york-state/aba...
    • throwaway4good 3y ago
      New York city vs Hong Kong sar. (Maybe I am exaggerating - difference in density is about factor 2.5)
    • NineStarPoint 3y ago
      Even then, the Hong Kong Administrative Region has about 430 square miles of land, compared to New York City’s 300 square miles of land. This is a more reasonable comparison than New York States 55,000 square miles of land. (The city of Hong Kong itself is more comparable in size to the Manhattan Island portion of New York City)
  • sct202 3y ago
    There are formerly inhabited islands in Boston harbor that are similar to these fishing villages, and they're mostly used now as stops on tourist day trips to explore ruins. It's a PITA to live in a place only accessibly by ferry.
• Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  There's a scene in a James May show where he visits a town in Japan that isn't quite abandoned yet, but very sparsely populated. One or several of the villagers were taken to making puppets and placing them around the empty buildings like the school. A shame, but also a natural progression if there are no jobs around anymore, and / or the jobs in the cities pay better and seem more attractive. We're lucky that in the software industry, a lot of jobs can be done remote now so people don't have to live in the cities unless they choose to, but that's only a fraction of the workforce.
  • LoveMortuus 3y ago
    While lack of jobs is one factor, I think a much bigger factor is the imminent colony collapse - birth rate being below the replacement level (which, if I remember correctly, is 2.1). And with the relatively wide availability of internet even in rural areas via satellites, the job factor is even lower. Of course, most jobs aren't computer/internet based, but there are still many jobs there, and some could say that the job market in those areas is growing (I'm aware of record-breaking lay-offs in the tech sector this year, but I think that has more to do with the current economy, I could be wrong)
    • spacebanana7 3y ago
      With a declining population, the number of occupied residential units must fall. Japan's fertility rate is 1.34. I suspect that residential units can be converted into commercial space in cities, or combined with other units to make bigger homes. Neither of those are easy in rural areas, so properties might need to be abandoned.
  • somenameforme 3y ago
    As a peer post hit on, this sort of stuff is mostly related to collapsing birth rates. Japan's lost about 6 million people since 2009 [1], and the rate of decline is still accelerating. That's millions of homes, businesses, and so on that no longer serve any purpose. And the wild thing is that, due to the way fertility works, they will keep losing at least the same ratio of people per year (currently about 1 in 200) until they either start having children, or go extinct. This, in turn, causes economic problems. When a country has high fertility rates, their market naturally grows year by year. And vice versa, when they have a low fertility rate. So it's likely to become a vicious cycle. The population declining because of low fertility rate drives economic chaos resulting in even lower fertility rates. And this same future awaits every country with sub-replacement fertility rates. It's like watching a train wreck unfold in ultra slow-mo, but being no more capable of independently stopping it. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/japan-population/ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/japan-populat...
• freedomben 3y ago
  Nice, the real questions I had about the Abandoned Japanese School (like how he gets power and money) were answered in a part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwGx4lXTWfw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwGx4lXTWfw