The shrinking town of Imabetsu has no supermarkets or restaurants, and only one taxi
Hisaaki Nakajima ran for mayor of Imabetsu, on the northernmost tip of Honshu, Japan’s main island, he said he had a vision of a town of 2,000 people. That may have sounded odd, given that Imabetsu had 2,700 inhabitants at the time . But it is shrinking fast. Since Mr Nakajima took office, the population has declined by around 150, or some 6%. On a pleasant spring day the streets are almost empty; many buildings are disused.
Because baby-boomers are starting to die off, the depopulation of rural areas is set to spike, reckons Shiro Koike of the. In 2014 Mr Masuda predicted that 896 of Japan’s 1,700 municipalities would be extinct by 2040. He has now revised that to 929. In the five years to 2016, by the government’s count, 190 places disappeared from the map .
The national government wants to raise the fertility rate from 1.4 children per woman to 1.8. To that end, it is trying to provide more support for families, such as making nursery free. It has also begun admitting more migrants, but not enough to compensate for the decline in the native population—and anyway, the government insists it will not let them settle permanently. What is more, immigrants, like Japanese themselves, prefer to live in cities.
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