![]() I guess I thought it would be a gorgeous place for kids to grow up." "I thought of Wakayama's abundant nature, seas, mountains, and rivers. "The idea of pursuing agriculture, and having a more grounded existence appealed to me," Uchiyama said. Among its biggest draws for tourists are the hot springs, the giant pandas at the Wakayama City Zoo, and the thousand-year-old Kumano Kodo Pilgrimage Route, which winds through 43 miles of mountains, forests, and coastlines.įor some, like Uchiyama, the land is the appeal. The area has been described both as Japan's spiritual heartland and its fruit kingdom. Wakayama City – the prefecture's biggest city and home to about 40% of its total population - is about an hour and 15 minutes from Osaka. ![]() The prefecture of 934,000 people (as of the 2018 census) lies on the rugged southeastern coast of Japan. One airport, four universities, and a whole lot of empty houses: This, at a glance, is Wakayama. "This will only get worse," McMorran said, "because the core of the problem is there aren't enough people to go around in Japan." It's also, he said, linked to the birthrate in Japan, which has been on a downward trend since the 1970s. "The fact that there are so many empty houses is a blight on the landscape, and a further deterrent, because people don't want to live in a terminal village surrounded by 'ghost houses,'" McMorran said. He told Insider that young people are hesitant to move to countryside homes because of limited opportunities - and because of the akiya themselves. While COVID-19 gave many workers the option of working in big cities like Tokyo without actually living there, Chris McMorran, an associate professor in the department of Japanese studies at the National University of Singapore (NUS), offers a bleak outlook for rural communities. The government is offering incentives like $500 homes and tax breaks to entice residents to move from urban centers into rural areas like Wakayama, but cheap housing may not be enough to bridge the cultural divide and the bureaucratic difficulties that moving to a small town create. In some areas, nearly one out of every five homes is empty. These abandoned houses have created "ghost villages" in Japan's rural prefectures where homes can neither be filled nor knocked down. Japan's Housing and Land Survey, conducted every five years, logged a record high of 8.49 million akiya in 2018. While the US faces a shortage of homes, Japan is experiencing an altogether different issue: There's a glut of unoccupied homes throughout the country's rural areas. The facade of Seichi's farmhouse after renovation. Meanwhile, those who set up IT businesses in rural Japan can apply for a grant of 3 million yen ($27,343).Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. In September, Nikkei reported on a program through which remote workers who maintain employment in Tokyo while working from the countryside will be given a 1 million yen ($9,114) cash grant. Similarly, the town of Daisen in Tottori Prefecture saw a 7.9% drop in the number of empty properties when the local government offered 2 million yen ($18,229) grants to those who were renovating certain houses listed in its database. Nikkei reported that Mikasa in the northern prefecture of Hokkaido recorded an 11% decrease in its number of empty homes when the city rolled out subsidies for child care and home purchases. Some provincial governments have found that offering cash is one of the best ways to draw in remote workers. "The program not only helps the old owners, who were struggling to utilize the properties and pay taxes, but also for the town by reducing the number of abandoned buildings that could collapse or otherwise pose risks in the future," a spokesman for the Okutama government office told Nikkei. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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