As for hill villages, the population is less. We would have seen the total number in the few hundreds. If people move to cities for work and study, the population of that village will decrease and the village will cease to exist. But what Japan has done to make up for the decline has made the world look back.
We used to hear it as a joke that the Japanese will catch something. Japan, a pioneer in technological development, is lagging behind in population. Similarly, they are running in urbanization. As a result, many rural people are migrating to cities.
So there lived about 300 people in Nagoro, a small village in the Iya Valley on the outskirts of Shikoku, Japan. But as most of the people migrated to the cities, the population of this village reduced to 35. The villagers were heartbroken to see the town deserted without people.
During 2002, an artist named Tsugimi Ayano came to her hometown of Nagoro from Osaka to visit her ailing father after the death of her mother. He has made a cornfield doll out of his father’s old clothes to keep the birds from coming into his field and eating the grain.
A man of that village saw the toy and thought it was his father and went to say hello. That’s when a trap clicked. He decided to make puppets of the people who had died in the town and who had left the town for the cities. He hoped it would dispel the idea that those men did not exist. He started making puppets of some of his childhood acquaintances.
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First he made some man-sized puppets and planted them sitting and standing in important areas like village shops, bus stops and seats in public places. Seeing this, people said ‘this idea is good’ and they also came forward to make toys. By 2022 around 350 man-tall puppets have been made and placed in all parts of the village.
What started out as an attempt to not give the impression that the village was uninhabited ended up being a doll village with ten times as many dolls as humans. Locally, Nagoro Village is known as Doll Village or Scarecrow Village (Kakashi-no-sato).
This has created the impression that even the people who have left the village are still in the town. Even though there are no moving sounds, people live with the dolls creating a sense of presence.
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