My hometown is dying - literally - as memory of modernity withers away.
It occurred to me all of a sudden. I was standing at the busy intersection not far from my parents’ home in Japan, along with a few dozens of people waiting for the traffic lights to change. I could see shoppers in and out of stores across the street and down the block; others hurrying toward the train station. All in all, a normal street scene that I have come to expect in a bright sunny afternoon in this part of town, yet, something seemed completely wrong. There was no one in sight, I finally realized, who looked younger than myself.
My home of childhood is on the border between Yokohama and Yokosuka in Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo. During Japan’s early modern period, Yokohama developed quickly and prospered as a hub for international commerce, while Yokosuka was the beneficiary of the national policy of military and industrial expansion. After World War II, the northern part of Yokosuka became a major manufacturing zone, built upon the former Japanese naval air force base.
Childhood Memory
I didn’t know much about my hometown’s history when I was young. I just remember large caves dug on the hillside, where they hid airplanes away from the U.S. bombers during the war; a tour of the shiny, modern automobile factory in a walking distance from my grade school, which was a stark contrast to small and dingy machinist’s shops that dotted my working-class neighborhood. I also remember playgrounds teeming with kids and the elementary school that kept growing so fast that some classes had to be taught in temporary shacks.
If I stood at the same intersection back then, I’d have seen a steady stream of factory workers in grey uniforms, who worked in two shifts six days of a week; packs of school kids with randoseru (heavy leather backpacks that grade school pupils carried in my day) on their way home from school; young mothers with babies and infants strapped on their back standing in the corner for a quick chat during their daily grocery run. People were dressed simply; shops and eateries that lined the streets were small and shabby. It wasn’t unusual to see red-faced drunks staggering out of a liquor store, where they used to sell sake and shochu by the glass. It wasn’t fancy, but surely a lively place to grow up in.
Aging Nation
Today store fronts are cleaner and people are better dressed; no more factory uniforms or shady watering holes in sight. As a whole, it looks more orderly – and older, much, much older. People I see on the street seem mostly in their 60s, 70s and even 80s, retired and having little to do. If they have enough spending money, they’d go hang out at one of the popular chain coffeehouses or fast food restaurants; if not, they’d take over the sitting area in the nearby supermarket, sip their vending-machine tea in a plastic bottle and share snacks out of a bag.
The declining birth rate and rapid aging of Japanese population is no news; it began to draw the concern of Japanese policymakers, public pundits and scholars in the late 1980s, and in the last couple of decades, experts in other industrialized countries have begun to look at Japan’s plight as their own reality in the near future. International news media have also started to report on the effects of demographic changes in Japan, from the impact of labor shortage to the challenges of elder care.
In my “Japanese Society and Culture” class this semester, we read one of such reports about kodokushi (solitary death) from the New York Times, which featured elderly residents in a nearly empty danchi (apartment complex) that was once full of young families.
A Dying City?
While my students were struck by the sense of isolation that permeated the story, I knew that something very similar had been happening in my neighborhood. Almost a decade ago, tiny wooden homes in the public housing complex where I grew up were torn down, except for my parents’, who flatly refused to relocate; a few years ago, I found out that a bigger danchi ,where many of my grade school friends used to live, was about to be demolished. The signs were there all the way along; but I was slow to see them for real.
Yokosuka is one of the municipalities around the country with alarmingly high rates of population loss, and rapid population decline has resulted in a growing number of akiya, or abandoned homes.
In fact, Yokosuka is one of the municipalities around the country with alarmingly high rates of population loss, and rapid population decline has resulted in a growing number of akiya, or abandoned homes. Especially problematic are those houses built on steep hills that cover much of the city: once acceptable as inexpensive housing options, they are being abandoned in large numbers today. The city maintains akiya banku (abandoned home registry), in their effort to match empty houses with potential residents, but acknowledges that growing housing surplus is a nation-wide problem, and that there is no effective solution is in sight for their akiya problem.
When I lived in Colorado, I marveled at ghost towns that sprung up in the middle of mountains during the Gold Rush in the late 1850s and got depopulated just as quickly when many of the mines petered out. Yokosuka was also a boom town, born during Japan’s drive for modernization and grew with its prewar militarization and postwar industrial prosperity. With the uncertain future of national economy, I wonder, it may also be destined to disappear. Perhaps not so abruptly as those Colorado mining towns, but more slowly and painfully, one emptied house at a time.
[This article was originally published on Japan News (Nov 21, 2019)]
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