Weeds and vines grow around an abandoned house in Oshima, Japan, on March 9, 2023, before the ceremony to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 2011 Great Tohoku Earthquake. Yamazaki/Getty Images CNN Abandoned houses are called "autumn houses" in Japan. This term usually refers to abandoned houses hidden in rural areas.
But in major cities such as Tokyo and Kyoto, more and more Qiuxiao Palace appears. This is a problem for the government that is already trying to cope with the aging population and the alarming decline in the number of children born every year.
Jeffrey Hall, a lecturer at Kanda University of International Studies in Chiba Prefecture, said: "This is a symptom of Japan's population decline. He said, "This is actually not a problem of building too many houses", but "a problem of not having enough people".
According to data compiled by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, 14% of Japanese houses are vacant.
These figures include second homes and houses vacant for other reasons, including properties temporarily vacant by owners while working overseas.
Experts told CNN that they are not all destroyed like traditional autumn leaves ducks, and the number of autumn leaves ducks is increasing, which has brought a series of other problems to the government and the community.
These problems include blocked efforts to revitalize decaying towns, potential dangers due to lack of maintenance, and increased risks for rescuers in the event of disasters in countries with frequent earthquakes and tsunamis.
The problem of too many houses
Autumn leaves are usually passed down from generation to generation. However, experts told CNN that with the sharp decline in Japan's fertility rate, many people have no heirs, or are inherited by the younger generation who moved to cities. They think it is of little value to return to rural areas.
They said that due to poor records, the local authorities did not know who the owners were, so some houses were also under administrative management.
This makes it difficult for the government to revitalize the rapidly aging rural communities, thus hindering efforts to attract young people interested in alternative lifestyles or investors concerned about bargains.
According to Japan's tax policy, some owners often find it cheaper to keep their houses than to demolish them for redevelopment.
Hall of Kanda University said that even if owners want to sell, it is difficult for them to find buyers.
He said: "Many of these houses are cut off from public transportation, medical care and even convenience stores.
On August 21, 2013, a vacant house was surrounded by overgrown vegetation in Yato, Yokosuka City, Kanagawa Prefecture. Jin Min Akio/Bloomberg/Getty Pictures/Archives In recent years, the trend video showing people (mainly foreigners) buying cheap Japanese houses and transforming them into fashionable hotels and cafes has attracted many fans on social media, but Hall warned that it is not as easy as it looks. He said: "The fact is that most of these houses will not be sold to foreigners, or it is not easy for a person who can't speak Japanese and has a good Japanese reading ability to manage the workload and the rules behind it."
"They can't buy these houses at a low price. “
There are too few people.
Japan's population has been declining for several years-at the last count in 2022, Japan's population has decreased by more than 800,000 since the previous year to 125.4 million.
According to official data, in 2023, the number of newborns in the United States declined for the eighth consecutive year, hitting a record low.
Japan's birth rate has been hovering around 1.3 for many years, far below the 2.1 needed to maintain population stability. Just last week, Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said that as of April 1, the number of children under the age of 15 had dropped to a record low of around 14 million for the 43rd consecutive year.
On April 5, 2023, a partially collapsed abandoned wooden house in Tambassa Mountain, Japan, Buddhika weerasinghe/Getty Images Therefore, all this means that the problem of too many houses and too few people seems to continue for some time. Yuki Akiyama, a professor at the School of Architecture and Urban Design of the City University of Tokyo, said that vacant houses have caused some problems in the past, such as after the 7.5-magnitude earthquake on the Nengdeng Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture in central China in January this year.
He said that autumn leaves were everywhere in the earthquake area, which posed a danger to residents during the disaster and also brought challenges to post-earthquake reconstruction.
He said: "When an earthquake or tsunami occurs, vacant houses may collapse and block evacuation routes."
Akiyama said that after the earthquake, due to unclear ownership, it was difficult for the authorities to decide which damaged property they could clean up, which brought "obstacles to reconstruction".
The professor said that in other rural areas where vacant houses are highly concentrated, the development of Qiuye Village has stagnated.
On December 29, 2022, the Japanese flag was decorated on a popular street in Ginza shopping district, Tokyo. Richard A Brooks/AFP/Getty Images Related Articles With the deepening of the population crisis, the birth rate in Japan has dropped to the lowest level in history. He said that if these properties remain unchanged, "the value of the area will be reduced because it is a place that cannot be bought and sold normally and cannot be developed on a large scale."
"People will think that this place is worthless and the real estate value of the whole area will gradually decrease."
Akiyama designed an artificial intelligence program to predict the areas most vulnerable to the attack of the autumn leaf weevil, but he stressed that this problem is not unique to Japan-it has also appeared in the United States and some European countries.
However, he said that Japan's architectural history and culture made the situation there particularly severe.
He said that Japanese houses are not valued for their life span, and unlike the West, people usually don't think it is good to live in historical buildings.
"In Japan, the newer the house, the higher the price," he said.