How Travel Is Saving Japan’s Disappearing Hamlets
Photo Credit: Rural Japan. Photo courtesy of Abercrombie & Kent
Skift Take
Japan’s marginal villages could be living on borrowed time as populations dwindle, but tourism is bringing respite. Here's how.
Yoko Era and husband traded their office jobs for a life in rural Asuka in Japan in 2005, drawn to farming as a way of getting closer to local produce. Today, the couple makes a living not only from farming, but also from their inn business, welcoming tourists to their homes in the bucolic mountains of Nara Prefecture.
Era is part of a new breed of urbanites choosing to move to rural Japan and finding opportunities in tourism — helping reverse a worrying trend of declining population outside of Japan’s thriving urban centers.
Like other countries around the world, Japan had been grappling with rural-urban migration as populations gravitate towards urban centers in search of economic opportunity.
However, the effects are especially pronounced in Japan, exacerbated by the world’s fastest aging population and plunging birth rates. By 2065, Japan is projected to lose one-third of its population, to just 88 million people. Census figures estimate the country’s population ha
