Free Republic

A youtuber shows a day in life of a Japanese Elementary School with only 8 students and 11 teachers. The school has about 20 rooms and had over 400 students in previous generations but is now virtually empty. There are about 11 million akiya, or abandoned homes, in rural Japan. Here we see a nearly abandoned school. The video shows happy students and teachers but you can also feel the sad decline. The school built for more capacity. The number of teachers should have been 20-30 and the number of students was and should be hundreds. All of the nearby...

You stumble across them everywhere, in villages and cities, in the smartest neighbourhoods and the most run down. They lurk behind overgrown gardens, decaying beneath veils of moss and ivy. Crows and raccoon dogs make their homes in them; little children peer through their gates and imagine ghosts. They are the “witch houses” of Japan — mysterious tokens of social decay in one of the wealthiest societies in the world. Called akiya, or abandoned homes, they have spread like mould in the past few years. The last time the government made a count, five years ago, it found 8.5 million...